ArXiv's Updated Rate Limit Policy (blog.arxiv.org)

30 pointsby 50kIters2 hours ago10 comments

bryan0 an hour ago

some highlights:

> In September of 2016, arXiv received 9,869 submissions. In September of 2024, arXiv received 20,569 submissions. This September, arXiv received 40,363 submissions, which in turn generated almost 9,000 support tickets for arXiv staff and moderators.

> arXiv now limits submitters to up to two submissions per calendar month, with a limit of three total active submissions at any given time.

the__alchemist an hour ago

Nice writeup and the policy is a step in the right direction. I suspect simple rate-limit measures like this will be a big improvement.

I suspect a logical conclusion Arxiv and elsewhere may be an identity management system with an aggressive filter, and shared blacklists. I suspect that classifying people as spam/slop-submitters, then banning them (or whatever identity they used; name, email, name + organization etc), applying incremental rate limits over the general one, may be required.

move6729 an hour ago

This will just force high SNR Posters to other platforms. ArXiv is rate limiting itself out of relevance.

AlotOfReading an hour ago

It doesn't seem humanly possible to produce >2 "high SNR" papers per month. If you have a larger batch of related papers, it's easy to spread submissions over multiple months. You should probably be doing that anyway, because comments on one paper may affect the others.

NotOscarWilde 35 minutes ago

> It doesn't seem humanly possible to produce >2 "high SNR" papers per month.

The situation right now is pretty crazy, for example this established TCS professor [1] has at least 4 arXiv submissions co-authored by him in September [2]. This includes the recent breakthrough on the matroid secretary problem, which has a pretty interesting AI story of its own, if you haven't seen it yet [3].

Of course prolific professors can work around this by working with younger researchers who upload the work, but this just makes the rate limit a solo author bottleneck, which feels a bit weird.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Hajiaghayi

[2]: https://arxiv.org/search/cs?query=Hajiaghayi&searchtype=auth...

[3]: Concurrent Discovery Disclosure: The proof of the main result in this manuscript was obtained in a conversation with ChatGPT-6 Astra on Tuesday, September 15, 2026 at 1:02 AM PDT. We then prepared this manuscript for public release, with the intent of uploading it on the morning of Thursday, September 17, 2026. In the early morning hours of September 17, while finalizing the submission, we discovered the manuscript of Abdi, Banihashem, Hajiaghayi, and Mittal, uploaded on September 16, 2026, which contains the same result via an essentially identical approach. We are sharing our manuscript nonetheless in case our exposition is of independent utility to the community, and we hope this experience stimulates broader discussion about concurrent discovery in the AI era. (From https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20797 .)

toomuchtodo an hour ago

It's pushing slop elsewhere.

sarjann 36 minutes ago

I imagine they could augment it with giving higher rates for some people based on things like h-index.

hingler36 35 minutes ago

Do you have a concrete example of a high SNR researcher who will be limited by this policy? Aka one who is submitting more than two high quality papers per month?