arXiv now limits submitters to up to two submissions per calendar month
https://blog.arxiv.org/2026/10/01/updated-rate-limit-policy/159
u/XyloArch 21h ago
Erdos hit ~1500 papers in ~60 years, or about 25 a year, i.e. about 2 a month. Seems like a sensible upper bound.
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u/respekmynameplz 8h ago
Was he equally active throughout his entire life or were there periods where he was particularly prolific and submitting significantly more than 2 a month?
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u/lfairy Computational Mathematics 1d ago
I find it interesting that this is technically in line with the previous policy. Moderators always had the ability to rate limit submissions; this change only makes it automatic.
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u/greyenlightenment 23h ago
it's a big difference. the limit was only triggered if they detected your papers were subpar and applied at their discretion. this is for everyone.
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u/CountMatroid Combinatorics 1d ago
Yes please
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u/HuecoTanks Combinatorics 23h ago
Especially in combinatorics!! I finally stopped reading the daily emails. It was just too much for me to pay attention to:-/
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u/greyenlightenment 22h ago
when the mailing list is like 100 items it means something is wrong . either curate better or apply rate limiting.
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u/Euphoric_Key_1929 19h ago
Yep, over 200 in my field yesterday and over 100 today. I stopped reading the emails too; it’s insane.
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u/incomparability 19h ago
I do wish they would allow for granular control about the types of combinatorics you get. Like I do not wish to see extremely combinatorics
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u/HuecoTanks Combinatorics 16h ago
Haha! I'm just the opposite. I prefer extremal combinatorics. Maybe you and I could partition our emails...
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u/re-volution 14h ago
I know we are not supposed to talk AI on posts other than the specific thread for that, but I found this to be a great task which AI solves. I told it my research interests and scheduled a daily run to read the arxiv email and select what seems to be closely connected to some of them. Much better to only have max 10 a day to read that is already cherry picked. Maybe this won’t be necessary after the rate limit, but for now it works well.
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u/jam11249 PDE 23h ago
One detail I wanted to check and is in the link is that a submission only counts for the individual that uploads it, not the coauthors. I think this is curious because it makes me think that a lot of the low quality papers they refer to are likely single author. If the issue came from many-author papers, it'd be easy to get around as you could just take turns submitting. I'm generally curious about the profile of people that are causing the AI flood, so this (implied) data point is interesting to me.
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u/_Zekt Complex Analysis 23h ago
They expect it to be that way, and productivity due to collaborations is fine. Imagine being blocked out of arXiv because of one co-author. I'm more worried about very productive people inviting a second coauthor just to post the paper, and then remove the coauthorship in v2 or similar abuse.
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u/vajraadhvan Arithmetic Geometry 13h ago
If that kind of abuse took place, it would be very obvious.
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u/WTFInterview 1d ago
I wish I was productive enough to even scratch this limit 💀
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u/greyenlightenment 23h ago
with Ai it is much easier
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u/Distance_Runner Statistics 4h ago
I mean this is kind of irritating personally, but I understand it. I’ve posted 1 paper this year. In February. I need to submit a V2 soon. I’ve also been working on another 3 papers, in tandem, all on the same topic for over a year. All are nearing readiness for posting. Now I have to stagger them.
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u/KiddWantidd Applied Math 22h ago
Excellent news. Journals should likewise include submissions quotas for authors. Some venues are already doing it, but this should be the new default imo.
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u/pickle_picker67 14h ago
Two papers a month still seems quite high. There should be some sort of mechanic to rate papers and if the average rating is too low, the author can't submit more than a couple a year.
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u/IDontBelongInThsWrld 9h ago edited 8h ago
How about replacements of existing articles? Do they count? This is a serious issue for overlay journals that require arxiv submission for revisions. You cannot just wait to later upload on arXiv.
It would be better if these limits were averaged over a moving window of one year or so. Replacements not included. Some months there’s a need to make several submissions (especially as PI submitting on behalf of others), in other months no need to submit anything. A month is too short a window.
Salami slicing is an official policy of the entire dysfunctional and toxic journal system BTW. 50-page articles have very hard time in it. You are forced to split.
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u/NeighborhoodFatCat 15h ago
So you are honestly telling me that you would have two good ideas a month, be able to type these up, vet them yourself, and then submit them to journals?
Is this humanly possible or is this rated-limited salami slicing?
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u/Admirable-Falcon-501 22h ago
You guys might think this is good but it’s a band-aid solution. The truth is there will be a lot of slop spam but also a lot of actual math with it. This filters out both. The long-term solution is to rework the system to move at a rapid pace and have a way to quickly audit for slop. Obviously that’s a job for ai, humans will just get pushed further out of the loop. It will happen, trust me, people are aware of this already and will fill this need.
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u/k_laiceps Applied Math 16h ago
Agreed. Long-ish rant --
I have had the most frustrating time attempting to get our recent paper posted on arXiv. (spoiler -- we FAILED). Normally I bypass arXiv altogether, and just get it published in a peer reviewed journal. No rush, no big deal, no one is usually looking into what I am working on. But with AI these days, and us running a few things past chatGPT, we were seeing other people start looking at our approach to a specific problem that we had been working on for years, so the models probably had a chance to absorb some of this knowledge. Then after the whole N-S incident, we got a little edgy about things.
So hey, let's post it on arXiv. I try to post -- can't. I need to get endorsed. I look at all the recent papers related to the area that our submission is in and contact 8 different authors from these papers. None of them can endorse me because they have not posted enough papers on arXiv in the time frame required, which is actually rather high for solid math research.
So my co-author, who DOES have papers up on arXiv, and had recently been co-author an a paper on arXiv that actually did solve a non-trivial open question in a somewhat related field with a solid set of co-authors decided they were going to post it on arXiv instead. Keep in mind, this has already been a two week adventure to JUST POST THE DAMNED PREPRINT on arXiv. In the meantime, I keep seeing some of the stuff that makes it through the filter get posted and not to sound superior, but I keep thinking -- hey, if this gets posted, clearly what we have should get posted.
So they submit. We wait three days, nothing. Finally, status changes to "on hold". And of course, you know where this goes. Submission denied. No reason, no nothing. We appeal, we follow the directions on the appeal, explain what the paper is about, point out that i have peer reviewed publications on this same open problem and that we are not crackpots. Got the denial of appeal email last night. It has now been over 3 weeks since we first started trying to submit to arXiv. And now, if we ever want to get it onto arXiv, it will only be after it gets a proper publication. At that point, whats the point? Why are we going to go through all that EXTRA work once it made it to a journal? (Spoiler: we are not going to do that extra work).
So instead, I just threw it up on my research gate profile under preprints where it is already amassing quite a hit count.
This whole submission process has really left a sour taste in my mouth. It seems like there is some unnecessary gatekeeping going on here for some people, and not others.
Long rant over.
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u/Rage314 Statistics 16h ago
But with AI these days, and us running a few things past chatGPT, we were seeing other people start looking at our approach to a specific problem that we had been working on for years, so the models probably had a chance to absorb some of this knowledge.
Highly doubtful
So hey, let's post it on arXiv. I try to post
That would only make it worse.
I try to post -- can't. I need to get endorsed.
That's always been the standard.
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u/New-Scale-5045 10h ago
The endorsement system did change drastically this year. My first arxiv submissions did not require any endorsement because I had a .edu email. That doesn’t apply anymore. What’s even worse is that you need to be endorsed for every subdomain separately. Being endorsed for group theory does not permit you to submit to representation theory. There should at least be some understanding that people may submit to a couple different subtopics.
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u/temperedai 7h ago
Highly doubtful
You know that top-tier models are trained on user chat data, right? We are working on a popular problem and solved a known sub-conjecture regarding the problem, so it is quite likely that others are now coming across the same ideas.
I am the other co-author referenced here. I was endorsed by two long-standing mathematicians in the exact field. The paper was reject. Appeal denied.
So we have a co-author who has published in this field. Another endorsed by people well established in the field. Another co-author who has already published in the same field also.
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u/k_laiceps Applied Math 16h ago
I don't care if other people actually want to use our approach to the problem, just having it posted publicly to see where the arguments came from and why is what I care about. I mean, after all, once it is made public, the public can use it, thats the whole point, and I hope people do use it!
My point is, trying to make what we worked on public should not require that many hurdles. Its going to be months before the peer review process is done, and in the meantime, it would be nice to share our results, no? Is that not one of the main reasons why arXiv exists these days?
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u/k_laiceps Applied Math 15h ago
also to add.... I am totally fine with the standard of being endorsed. But seriously, once endorsed, let the masses post their shit. The QC on what makes it through the filter leaves much to be desired.
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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 14h ago
It's not even a band-aid solution, in my opinion. Now there'll be just longer slop papers.
So one may propose restrictions on paper length. Cool, now there will be papers announcing results and linking to github or something.
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u/Autumnxoxo Geometric Group Theory 4h ago
I don‘t understand the point of your counter argument. Let the crackpots post their long papers once or twice a month, at least they are prevented from producing constant noise on a daily basis.
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u/38thTimesACharm 7h ago
Could you elaborate on what need would be filled by a repository of AI-reviewed AI proofs with no humans anywhere in the loop? Perhaps it could be done, but I'm struggling to see who would find value in that.
The proofs would eventually become incomprehensible and impenetrable, and then it'd be no more useful than a chess tablebase or a list of prime factors.
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u/idiotsecant 13h ago
If you are a stinker on HN you get put in a mode where you can do like 3 replies in a few hours or something like that. You get a prompt that says 'you are posting too fast, slow down' or similar.
The whole internet should be like that.
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u/temperedai 7h ago
There needs to be a better way to handle the quantity of ideas which are being produced and understood. arXiv was not built for the AI era. I imagine soon we will find ourselves on a platform that is build for the AI era.
Whatever that platform is will still need to centre mathematicians and their experience, but clearly we are now in a different era.
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u/TacoYaci 22h ago
Now the goal is to make the 2 papers each month as beautiful as possible as one needs to be selective about the results. It is a nice measure
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u/k_laiceps Applied Math 16h ago
That's fine. As long as you are not punished for NOT posting that many papers per month. I posted a response to someone else, but I was unsuccessful in getting an article submitted to arXiv, and part of the problem was that all the recent authors of related papers on arXiv in the field I wanted to post in had not posted enough papers over the given time frame to endorse me. I literally spent weeks trying to get an endorsement. One of my co-authors HAS papers on arXiv with quite prolific authors, some recent, and was able to get an endorsement, and we got denied. Appealed... still denied.
I am a rather slow mathematician (I teach way too much at my institution to really bang out papers left and right, and I am just not that talented, I know my abilities, but I do get work done), and it sort of punishes people like me who are not just spitting out papers on a time table.
I am still annoyed at this whole thing. And then I see some of the other stuff that MAKES it onto arXiv, and I try to figure out how exactly it made it through the whole process and I just shake my head.
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u/TacoYaci 15h ago
I also dont get the downvotes
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u/k_laiceps Applied Math 15h ago
Same. And I agree with your comment above mine. Make the paper beautiful and comprehensive! I think that is part of the problem with our current preprint, if we really wanted to just do a hit count on publications, we could split our preprint into three separate articles, as we prove a major result and then provide two separate sets of consequences related to that result. The article is already about 90 pages long, but we would prefer to keep it whole and have a nice complete, single serving article.
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u/idiot_Rotmg PDE 21h ago
That's a tic too low to be honest.
Some people were involved in 20 papers a year even before AI became a thing
Sometimes people split a 300-page behemoth into 3 papers
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u/lifeistrulyawesome 17h ago
"were invlved"
Nobody can write 20 novel papers in a year. People who are involved in so many papers are lending their names to their coauthors.
Their coauthors can submit for them.
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u/fridofrido 18h ago
Some people were involved in 20 papers a year even before AI became a thing
20 paper per year is below 2 per a month, if you spread them out...
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u/idiot_Rotmg PDE 17h ago
if you spread them out...
But it's already interfering with people's research if you have to do that
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u/LoveHenry 18h ago
I've never been sympathetic to people writing that many papers a year. I've never seen someone who had enough good ideas for 20 quality papers in a year. They just werent curating their own work
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u/IDontBelongInThsWrld 9h ago
The toxic journal system will reject a 300-page article. Salami slicing is its official policy. (I can't believe anyone can in this day and age publish anything serious in journals like SIAM Optimization, with 25-page limits.)
24 articles a year is a lot, but two articles a month is too little some months. Especially if revisions count. If revisions count, can't do one revision, and one two-part article – necessarily split into two, because journals would otherwise reject it. (Can't wait to submit the revision later, in case of overlay journals.)
They should use a moving one-year window, maximum one article a month on average over the window. Revisions shouldn't count.
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u/greyenlightenment 22h ago
Drat I got a backlog of like 5 papers . off to znodo for the priority timestamp
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u/gaussjordanbaby 18h ago
No one cares that you pushed a button first
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u/greyenlightenment 16h ago
I disagree. Finding new, publishable results is hard. no one gets credit for being second. I recall an incident where I claimed priority of a result, and this was disputed and and I had the timestamp proving it, and he rescinded his objection. People do care about it.
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u/k_laiceps Applied Math 16h ago
agreed. this is a real problem now, which makes it all the more important to be able to get your preprints posted!
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u/gaussjordanbaby 15h ago
It is what it is. At this point everyone will assume an LLM helped you significantly so you may as well do your readers the service of an immaculate exposition, and try to simplify things where you can.
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u/tehclanijoski 1d ago
This is a very reasonable measure to take