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ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

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Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#61

Post by hijodelsol »

frankling_ wrote: post #40

The recent announcement to reject review articles and position papers already smelled like a shift towards a more "opinionated" stance, and this move smells worse. The vacuum that arXiv originally filled was one of a glorified PDF hosting service with just enough of a reputation to allow some preprints to be cited in a formally published paper, and with just enough moderation to not devolve into spam and chaos. It ha…

I came here to say something similar. As someone who works in a field that applies machine learning but is not purely focused on it, I interact with people who think that arXiv is the only relevant platform and that they don't need to submit their work to any journal, as well as people who still think that preprints don't count at all and that data isn't published until it's printed in an academic journal. It can feel like a clash of worlds.

I think both sides could learn from the other. In the case of ML, I understand the desire to move fast and that average time to publication of 250-300 days in some of the top-tier journals can feel like an unnecessary burden. But having been on both sides of peer review, there is value to the system and it has made for better work.

Not doing any of it follows the same spirit as not benchmarking your approach against more than maybe one alternative and that already as an after-thought. Or benchmaxxing but not exploring the actual real-world consequences, time and cost trade offs, etc.

Now, is academic publishing perfect? Of course not, very very far from it. It desperately needs to be reformed to keep it economically accessible, time efficient for both authors, editors and peer reviewers and to prevent the "hot topic of the day" from dominating journals and making sure that peer review aligns with the needs of the community and actually improves the quality of the work, rather than having "malicious peer review" to get some citations or pet peeves in.

Given the power that the ML field holds and the interesting experiments with open review, I would wish for the field to engage more with the scientific system at large and perhaps try to drive reforms and improve it, rather than completely abandoning it and treating a PDF hosting service as a journal (ofc, preprints would still be desirable and are important, but they can not carry the entire field alone).

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#62

Post by ph4rsikal »

frankling_ wrote: post #40

The recent announcement to reject review articles and position papers already smelled like a shift towards a more "opinionated" stance, and this move smells worse. The vacuum that arXiv originally filled was one of a glorified PDF hosting service with just enough of a reputation to allow some preprints to be cited in a formally published paper, and with just enough moderation to not devolve into spam and chaos. It ha…

My observation is that research, especially in AI has left universities, which are now focusing their research to a lesser degree on STEM. It appears research is now done by companies like Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Tencent, Alibaba, among many others.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#64

Post by weedhopper »

cbolton wrote: post #59
MostlyStable wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI didn't get everything that they wanted, but I very much disagree with calling it a "failed attempt". The non-profit went from owning the entirety of OpenAI to having ~25% stake.

The non-profit still controls the board doesn't it?

As shown by Altman, not really.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#65

Post by swiftcoder »

> raised concerns about the proposed $300,000 salary for arXiv’s new CEO, saying it seemed high

Is a mid-to-high engineering salary outlandish for a CEO of what is likely to be a fairly major non-profit? Even non-profits have to be somewhat competitive when it comes to salary, and the ideal candidate is likely someone who would be balancing this against a tenured position at a major university

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#66

Post by swiftcoder »

vl wrote: post #60
binsquare wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For everyone else, The reason is because arxiv is growing significantly leading to 297,000 deficit in operating costs for 2025 alone. Corenell has helped with donation a long with other organizations that pay membership fees. As a result, donors + leaders of arxiv think it's best to spin off to increase funding.

What is unclear why they need stuff of 27 and 6.7 million to operate essentially static hosting website in 2026.

The "essentially static hosting" isn't the cost centre (although with 5 million MAU, it's nothing to sneeze at). The real costs are on the input side - they have an ingestion pipeline that ensures standardised paper formatting and so on, plus at least some degree of human review.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#67

Post by bonoboTP »

hijodelsol wrote: post #61
frankling_ wrote: post #40

The recent announcement to reject review articles and position papers already smelled like a shift towards a more "opinionated" stance, and this move smells worse. The vacuum that arXiv originally filled was one of a glorified PDF hosting service with just enough of a reputation to allow some preprints to be cited in a formally published paper, and with just enough moderation to not devolve into spam and chaos. It ha…

I came here to say something similar. As someone who works in a field that applies machine learning but is not purely focused on it, I interact with people who think that arXiv is the only relevant platform and that they don't need to submit their work to any journal, as well as people who still think that preprints don't count at all and that data isn't published until it's printed in an academic journal. It can fee…

Simply anticipating basic push backs from reviewers makes sure that you do a somewhat thorough job. Not 100% thorough and the reviews are sometimes frivolous and lazy and stupid. But just knowing that what you put out there has to pass the admittedly noisily gatekept gate of peer review overall improves papers in my estimation. There is also a negative side because people try to hide limitations and honest assessments and cherry pick and curate their tables more in anticipation of knee jerk reviewers but overall I think without any peer review, author culture would become much more lax and bombastic and generally trend toward engagement bait and social media attention optimized stuff.

The current balance where people wrote a paper with reviers in mind, upload it to Arxiv before the review concludes and keep it on Arxiv even if rejected is a nice balance. People get to form their own opinion on it but there is also enough self-imposed quality control on it just due to wanting it to pass peer review, that even if it doesn't pass peer review, it is still better than if people write it in a way that doesn't care or anticipate peer review. And this works because people are somewhat incentivized to get peer reviewed official publications too. But being rejected is not the end of the world either because people can already read it and build on it based on Arxiv.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#68

Post by bonoboTP »

ph4rsikal wrote: post #62
frankling_ wrote: post #40

The recent announcement to reject review articles and position papers already smelled like a shift towards a more "opinionated" stance, and this move smells worse. The vacuum that arXiv originally filled was one of a glorified PDF hosting service with just enough of a reputation to allow some preprints to be cited in a formally published paper, and with just enough moderation to not devolve into spam and chaos. It ha…

My observation is that research, especially in AI has left universities, which are now focusing their research to a lesser degree on STEM. It appears research is now done by companies like Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Tencent, Alibaba, among many others.

Universities (outside a few) just have much weaker PR machines so you never hear what they do. Also their work is not user facing products so regular people, even tech power users won't see them.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#69

Post by bonoboTP »

I fear their Mozilla-ification and Wikipedia-ification. Scope creep, various outreach feel-good programs, ballooning costs, lost focus etc. And other types of enshittification.

Any change to the basic premise will be a negative step.

They should just be boring quiet unopininionated neutral background infrastructure.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#70

Post by auggierose »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #58
auggierose wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am using Zenodo for a while now instead. It is more user friendly, as well.

I like it as well, it works great. But I wonder if it would scale if at some point there were a massive exodus from arXiv.

I think it already hosts much more data than arXiv, given that they also host large datasets.
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