The article has a melancholic tone running through it, felt especially keenly when you consider it a microcosm of the much wider struggles of maintaining a public good: sustaining it while keeping its integrity.
When your service is small or not easily visible - while still doing significant good - it's hard to find enough people willing to spend their time and resources helping you sustain it.
When your service becomes big enough to be noticeable - which is the arXiv is in by now - it also becomes attractive to the people looking to subvert it to be something else, to enshittify it, and so the limiting factor in getting help becomes the risk to its integrity.
The power issue with platforms is a bit like with polities : sure, a platform might be great when ruled by an enlightened despot (and there's probably a survival bias here for the most enlightened ones ?), but that's only a small fraction of its life of domination, and what happens once the enlightened despot goes away (in one way or the other) ?
So it's probably better to not rely on platforms in the first place...
Totally agree, researchers shouldn't rely on ArXiv as being their only publishing platform. Also due to the rigid narrow format of the paper, each paper should have a page, to link to the code, link to the talk about the paper, etc.
It is unbelievable how much more communicative power a paper with a site vs just a paper on arxiv.
Scihub hasn’t been updated since 2020! But anyway arxiv has a lot of important features specifically for academic papers (eg quality control, categories, browsing, issuing dois, etc)
Okay, I found out that on Reddit [0] that you can follow for updates on the website of High Court of Delhi [1] (though you may need a VPN as it seems to be geo-blocked).
libgen has been getting taken down especially after it came out that "AI companies" downloaded the entire archive for their training. Is it even still up? Furthermore, you can go go arXiv and see papers that got released yesterday or today. You can't find those on libgen or scihub.
- I want to have a DOI for something I also sell, like a book.
- I want a DOI for something that is still being submitted, and I don't want to share it yet with everybody, only a select few (like reviewers).
- A previous version of your paper has a serious problem (could be an error, or containing a password you would rather not share), and you want to remove public access to it.
"In 2021, the journal Nature declared arXiv one of the “10 computer codes that transformed science,” praising its role in fostering scientific collaboration. (The article is behind a paywall—unlock it for $199 a year.)"
Burned!
Re ArXiv
I read in their licensing that some papers are licensed for non-commercial use. Does anyone know an easy way to tell which are licensed that way?
I normally see the main, ArXiv page for a specific paper. Is there something on the page for licensing that I overlooked?
arXiv has one of my papers on hold for a long time because their team couldn't believe I—someone without a CS degree—was able to create a programming language from scratch on my own.
1. Creating a programming language from scratch isn't hard.
2. It's also worthless.
3. arXiv is for scientific papers and not just random PDFs or project reports.
4. Creating a programming language can be science but something tells me that yours isn't.
I've seen solutions to the halting problem published on something called ResearchGate. I don't know anything about it but maybe you can upload there. Or just use your website or Google Drive, like how a normal person shares PDFs.
You don't have all the context. The language serves a serious novel purpose. You seem to be bitter about someone uploading a research paper (I didn't say it was a white paper) to arXiv.
You also didn’t share all the context. By all means criticise arXiv, but unless you provide enough context you have to expect to receive criticism back.
Personally I’d be fascinated to hear what your language was that warranted a paper submission to arXiv if you want to share.
All you gave us to go on was that you created a programming language (kudos) and wrote "a paper" with no further context as to why it merited submission and/or what it entailed other than it was rejected and you were nonplussed about that. Granted, that doesn't justify imo their accusation of the work as "worthless," that was rude and unmerited, but unfortunately par for the course these days as the Principle of Charity[0] on the internet was bagged, tagged, and buried at sea many years ago. If anything, the law of the land is the opposite now: Assume the worst/least if not explicitly stated, and that any reply/engagement is de facto adversarial. Welcome to the future, where ~~nothing works~~ everything is enshittified, even the social interactions.
I've never submitted to arxiv, is there an appeals/recourse process or some such, or is it just stuck in indefinite limbo or what?
I have the privilege of working with some physicists every day, and it's definitely not only boomers that do not give a damn about software engineering practices. "If it works now, it's good" mantra is pretty popular even among younger crowd.
We're in a political climate where scientific institutions are under threat, so of course they will loudly justify their own existence and value. It'd be irresponsible of them not to. That's not all that similar to a company being acquired and subsequently squeezed for value. ArXiv isn't a loss leader for a venture backed firm.
arXiv has nothing to gain by a PR blitz. Any academic knows what is arXiv exactly for, and there is no intention to grow user base or whatever. It's not a social media.
Not sure I agree with the comment you're responding to. But the article discusses some of their funding troubles, and the main mage of arxiv.org itself has a donate link. So I think perhaps the media presence might be motivated by a desire to fundraise (and IMO they absolutely deserve funding because of the important work they do).
You're right. I didn't consider the funding angle at all, but only the accusation of "enshittification" which usually comes from a VC or an entity that wants to generate more profits by expanding. On the other hand, I do think Simons Foundations would not let arXiv die. Also, I don't agree that arXiv's media presence has ulterior motives after all. It might just be that it's getting its share of fame.
You may reasonably disagree with my comment, but using your imagination you'll find that there are lots of ways by which arXiv (the organization) and its staff could benefit from PR.
Lots of academics in distant fields are unaware of arXiv, and even academics (like me) who use arXiv daily and host their preprints there don't think of it as any more than a place to store, catalogue, and retrieve papers.
Look at all the ways in which arXiv is (like any institution) perpetuating and expanding itself:
https://blog.arxiv.org/
I've been gratefully using and contributing to arXiv since 2008, and I hope it continues to be the incredible resource that it is. I think your take is naive and that even great institutions can end up like Mozilla.
https://archive.ph/2025.03.27-115038/https://www.wired.com/s...
http://web.archive.org/web/20250419005938/https://www.wired....
> (“xxx” didn’t have the explicit connotations it does today, Ginsparg emphasized).
In the 90s? That is so not true me think Paul is willfully being forgetful.
The article has a melancholic tone running through it, felt especially keenly when you consider it a microcosm of the much wider struggles of maintaining a public good: sustaining it while keeping its integrity.
When your service is small or not easily visible - while still doing significant good - it's hard to find enough people willing to spend their time and resources helping you sustain it.
When your service becomes big enough to be noticeable - which is the arXiv is in by now - it also becomes attractive to the people looking to subvert it to be something else, to enshittify it, and so the limiting factor in getting help becomes the risk to its integrity.
The power issue with platforms is a bit like with polities : sure, a platform might be great when ruled by an enlightened despot (and there's probably a survival bias here for the most enlightened ones ?), but that's only a small fraction of its life of domination, and what happens once the enlightened despot goes away (in one way or the other) ?
So it's probably better to not rely on platforms in the first place...
Totally agree, researchers shouldn't rely on ArXiv as being their only publishing platform. Also due to the rigid narrow format of the paper, each paper should have a page, to link to the code, link to the talk about the paper, etc.
It is unbelievable how much more communicative power a paper with a site vs just a paper on arxiv.
> For scientists, imagining a world without arXiv is like the rest of us imagining one without public libraries
Are there scientists that don't know libgen or scihub?
Scihub hasn’t been updated since 2020! But anyway arxiv has a lot of important features specifically for academic papers (eg quality control, categories, browsing, issuing dois, etc)
Do you know the latest on that? Are they still holding their breaths over that court case in India?
I have no idea (but wish I knew). I’m embarrassed to admit it took me years to even notice that it wasn’t being updated anymore
Okay, I found out that on Reddit [0] that you can follow for updates on the website of High Court of Delhi [1] (though you may need a VPN as it seems to be geo-blocked).
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/1j5rmus/2192025_hig...
[1] https://delhihighcourt.nic.in/court/dhc_case_status_list_new...
libgen has been getting taken down especially after it came out that "AI companies" downloaded the entire archive for their training. Is it even still up? Furthermore, you can go go arXiv and see papers that got released yesterday or today. You can't find those on libgen or scihub.
It is still up, but DNS blocked in some countries. arXiv papers are not published in journals yet. Annas archive has also newer papers than scihub.
I prefer Zenodo (hosted by CERN). More features (such as access restrictions), and no fuss about what kind of data I want to upload (any PDF is fine).
Why are access restrictions useful?
I see at least three reasons:
- I want to have a DOI for something I also sell, like a book.
- I want a DOI for something that is still being submitted, and I don't want to share it yet with everybody, only a select few (like reviewers).
- A previous version of your paper has a serious problem (could be an error, or containing a password you would rather not share), and you want to remove public access to it.
Re article
"In 2021, the journal Nature declared arXiv one of the “10 computer codes that transformed science,” praising its role in fostering scientific collaboration. (The article is behind a paywall—unlock it for $199 a year.)"
Burned!
Re ArXiv
I read in their licensing that some papers are licensed for non-commercial use. Does anyone know an easy way to tell which are licensed that way?
I normally see the main, ArXiv page for a specific paper. Is there something on the page for licensing that I overlooked?
ArXiv: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv
ArXiv accepts .ps (PostScript), .tex (LaTeX source), and .pdf (PDF) ScholarlyArticle uploads.
ArXiv docs > Formats for text of submission: https://info.arxiv.org/help/submit/index.html#formats-for-te...
The internet and the web are the most transformative platforms in all of science, though.
arXiv has one of my papers on hold for a long time because their team couldn't believe I—someone without a CS degree—was able to create a programming language from scratch on my own.
1. Creating a programming language from scratch isn't hard.
2. It's also worthless.
3. arXiv is for scientific papers and not just random PDFs or project reports.
4. Creating a programming language can be science but something tells me that yours isn't.
I've seen solutions to the halting problem published on something called ResearchGate. I don't know anything about it but maybe you can upload there. Or just use your website or Google Drive, like how a normal person shares PDFs.
You don't have all the context. The language serves a serious novel purpose. You seem to be bitter about someone uploading a research paper (I didn't say it was a white paper) to arXiv.
You also didn’t share all the context. By all means criticise arXiv, but unless you provide enough context you have to expect to receive criticism back.
Personally I’d be fascinated to hear what your language was that warranted a paper submission to arXiv if you want to share.
All you gave us to go on was that you created a programming language (kudos) and wrote "a paper" with no further context as to why it merited submission and/or what it entailed other than it was rejected and you were nonplussed about that. Granted, that doesn't justify imo their accusation of the work as "worthless," that was rude and unmerited, but unfortunately par for the course these days as the Principle of Charity[0] on the internet was bagged, tagged, and buried at sea many years ago. If anything, the law of the land is the opposite now: Assume the worst/least if not explicitly stated, and that any reply/engagement is de facto adversarial. Welcome to the future, where ~~nothing works~~ everything is enshittified, even the social interactions.
I've never submitted to arxiv, is there an appeals/recourse process or some such, or is it just stuck in indefinite limbo or what?
I have no idea if your contribution is valuable or not, but arXiv doesn't either. Just use zenodo instead of arXiv.
[flagged]
I have the privilege of working with some physicists every day, and it's definitely not only boomers that do not give a damn about software engineering practices. "If it works now, it's good" mantra is pretty popular even among younger crowd.
[flagged]
We're in a political climate where scientific institutions are under threat, so of course they will loudly justify their own existence and value. It'd be irresponsible of them not to. That's not all that similar to a company being acquired and subsequently squeezed for value. ArXiv isn't a loss leader for a venture backed firm.
arXiv has nothing to gain by a PR blitz. Any academic knows what is arXiv exactly for, and there is no intention to grow user base or whatever. It's not a social media.
Not sure I agree with the comment you're responding to. But the article discusses some of their funding troubles, and the main mage of arxiv.org itself has a donate link. So I think perhaps the media presence might be motivated by a desire to fundraise (and IMO they absolutely deserve funding because of the important work they do).
You're right. I didn't consider the funding angle at all, but only the accusation of "enshittification" which usually comes from a VC or an entity that wants to generate more profits by expanding. On the other hand, I do think Simons Foundations would not let arXiv die. Also, I don't agree that arXiv's media presence has ulterior motives after all. It might just be that it's getting its share of fame.
You may reasonably disagree with my comment, but using your imagination you'll find that there are lots of ways by which arXiv (the organization) and its staff could benefit from PR.
Lots of academics in distant fields are unaware of arXiv, and even academics (like me) who use arXiv daily and host their preprints there don't think of it as any more than a place to store, catalogue, and retrieve papers.
Look at all the ways in which arXiv is (like any institution) perpetuating and expanding itself: https://blog.arxiv.org/
Look at these extra things arXiv is doing (including commercial integrations): https://info.arxiv.org/labs/showcase.html
I've been gratefully using and contributing to arXiv since 2008, and I hope it continues to be the incredible resource that it is. I think your take is naive and that even great institutions can end up like Mozilla.