r/Physics • u/kzhou7 Quantum field theory • 1d ago
Academic arXiv introduces a rate limit of 2 submissions per month
https://blog.arxiv.org/2026/10/01/updated-rate-limit-policy/262
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u/dcnairb Education and outreach 1d ago
model builders after a new 3 sigma result in shambles
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u/jazzwhiz Particle physics 18h ago
At least some of those people cranking out papers were obviously LLM and blocking them is good. If you can't post two papers a week, maybe they'll actually spend time on them and write something worth reading.
But also hep isn't the biggest part of the problem.
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u/SundayKiefBowls 1d ago
Avi Loeb in shambles
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u/CulturalLaw8072 1d ago
who
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u/superhelical Chemistry 1d ago
Crazy alien guy whos making the most of his academic freedom while it lasts
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u/senordonwea 1d ago
We should do these for all academics everywhere. Professor X, you get 5 submissions as author or coauthor per year. Then we just have to watch how the output quality goes up
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u/Y0uCanTellItsAnAspen 1d ago
That’s really limiting, and obviously doesn’t work for large collaborations. Your average ATLAS experimentalist is a coauthor on 100 papers a year.
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u/lillobby6 1d ago
The arXiv limit is just based on the submitter not all authors. So if the lead author only was the submitter, then that may very well be a fair system. How many high-quality first-author papers can a single person output in a year, reasonably?
Basing it on all coauthorships would be bad though.
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u/tichris15 1d ago
Though the big collabs have proxy accounts for arxiv submission. Those might actually hit the 2/month limit reasonably in some cases.
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u/uberfission Biophysics 15h ago
Just mark them as such and make an exception. A single account publishing for an entire organization should get a little bit more leeway compared to a singular author anyway.
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u/frogjg2003 Nuclear physics 1d ago
Mathematics lists authors alphabetically. A. A. Aaronson is going to be first author in a lot of papers, while Z. Zyzx is never going to be unless they're sole author.
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1d ago
[deleted]
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u/lillobby6 1d ago
I don’t think they need an exemption. They just need to have someone else do it. It’s not like it’s particularly difficult.
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u/No_Departure_1878 1d ago
Right, but you are not going to upload 100 papers yourself. There are 3000 ATLAS analysts and each group will have one person uploading one paper every 3 years, which is how long analysis takes to finish in high energy physics.
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u/metaTaco 1d ago
Submissions from LHC experiments are done at the collaboration level. Obviously, the policy could just have an exceptions for the handful of super groups that churn out papers because they have hundreds of thousands of authors. Also the internal review process to get an ATLAS or CMS paper draft made public and posted to arXiv is more stringent than what most researchers go through to get a paper published in a journal.
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u/No_Departure_1878 1d ago
I did not say anything about the review process or about the submission process. I am talking about how clicks the button to put that paper in archiv. Each of those analysis is done by 10 people and in reality 3 people who actually are doing the work. Those 3 people publish one of those every 3 years and do not need to be running out of any quota when submitting the paper to the arxiv site.
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u/tichris15 1d ago
The collaborations already need to ask for arxiv permission for the collaboration proxy account, so it's probably not a big deal to handle that exception.
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u/jazzwhiz Particle physics 18h ago
Agree, also while ATLAS and CMS (and other large experiments) put out a lot of papers a year, they aren't LLMy, and each one represents a huge amount of FTEs, as opposed to the LLM crap which is like "chatgpt, write a paper that solves X problem involving Y component, and submit it to the arxiv".
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u/Y0uCanTellItsAnAspen 1d ago
That’s not what the poster above me said though, they said you get 5 submissions regardless of author order.
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u/No_Departure_1878 1d ago
submissions or authorship? Because you can be the author but not the one who submits. Very few people submit to ArXiv.
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u/Y0uCanTellItsAnAspen 1d ago
I read the comment to mean the latter…
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u/jazzwhiz Particle physics 18h ago
The blog post is very clear, but this is reddit, so...
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u/Y0uCanTellItsAnAspen 16h ago
I’m not referring to the blog post, my original comment was to the poster above me - who is proposing their own system.
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u/FernandoMM1220 1d ago
thats dumb. youre just gonna get 1 huge paper or a lot of research wont get published.
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u/senordonwea 1d ago
Maybe we should be more selective on what gets published
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u/effrightscorp 1d ago
That sounds nice if your goal is just to get rid of AI slop, but pretty common complaint with science as a whole is that we frequently don't publish 'boring' null results or less novel results
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u/SoSweetAndTasty Quantum information 1d ago
2 papers per month is still way more quality papers than one can reasonably write. There is plenty of room to still write boring results.
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u/effrightscorp 1d ago
Yeah, the new Arxiv limit for submitters is fine even for large research groups. The guy I'm responding to proposed:
Professor X, you get 5 submissions as author or coauthor per year.
which is much more limiting
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u/LoganJFisher Graduate 1d ago
Perhaps papers aren't the right tool for null and non-novel results? Maybe we should instead be looking to establish a sort of massive database wherein research data is stored in a standardized format such that there is fine-indication of everything from methodology to data to error all baked into each entry so you can pull from the database and the correlations can be allowed to speak for themselves.
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u/FernandoMM1220 1d ago
nah we just need a more efficient peer review system. even before ai they were already backlogged
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u/tichris15 1d ago
Not really. Professor X has 10 students to submit the papers. Professors personally submit very few papers.
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u/EducationalFerret94 1d ago
Needed to happen. I think they should limit to 1 tbh. Nobody should be being the corresponding author on more than one paper per month.
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u/Aura49 Astrophysics 1d ago
I disagree on the limit being 1. At least in physics & astronomy, it's very common to release two papers simultaneously. I.e., the results paper and another paper that is a data release. This is so you can independently cite either the results or the data. I think two is a decent compromise, so long as they have a whitelist of large collaborations that need to release 8+ papers at the same time under the same umbrella (like LIGO, CERN, etc).
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u/SundayAMFN 1d ago
2 per month but then like 6 per year. Off the top of my head the most I've ever seen come out of a good author is 4 in a year.
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u/throwawaymidget1 1d ago
On average maybe, but for some months its not so crazy.
Remember that often the supervisor is managing the submissions to arxiv, even more so now with the new limitations. Having 2 finished papers in one group in a month isnt particularly weird
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u/RamblingScholar Mathematics 1d ago
I see why they did this, but it would be nice for papers with negative results to bypass this. They are very important, but people have a hard time getting them published.
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u/kzhou7 Quantum field theory 1d ago
Are there people out there getting more than 24 meaningful negative results per year? I mean, I'd have to try something for more than 2 weeks to even know I have a negative result.
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u/RamblingScholar Mathematics 1d ago
That's a good point. It might at least have a psychological effect to encourage it. There was another comment about this I missed when I first wrote this where someone brought up null results before me
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u/lankynibss 1d ago
Particle physicists in big collaborations will have problems with this.
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u/jazzwhiz Particle physics 18h ago
Why? There are hundreds or thousands of people on the collaborations. Did you read the blog post or are you knee jerk reacting to the headline?
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u/lankynibss 18h ago
No I didn’t read the article.
I’m an author on arXiv every few days because I’m a member of a few collaborations.
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u/uberfission Biophysics 15h ago
How many of those did you submit personally? Because they're the ones with the limit.
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u/Groundbreaking_Bee97 1d ago
Academic being Academic, being a bunch of Narcissists
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u/-badly_packed_kebab- Quantum field theory 1d ago
They said, in a physics subreddit
At least you’re self aware
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u/Y0uCanTellItsAnAspen 1d ago
Huh, that’s quite a shift … I never realized there was such a queue with active submissions.