alt Hacker NewsMy take: this seems excessive.
ArXiv doesn't even check the submission closely, so how can they know?
They say "errors, mistakes"
They use an automated system to check if the basic requirements were met, and sometimes papers are flagged for further superficial human review, but there is no way they can possibly do this at scale or check every reference. This would be like trying to do peer review, but for a preprint archive that gets easily 100x more volume than any journal.
Second, there is such a huuuuge gap between publishing on arvix and peer review. I can attest personally that it's not even close. I've gotten probably dozen rejections from peer review and no problems publishing in arxiv math. This is because peer review checks not just for if something is new or correct, but also if it's of "interest to math community," which is inherently subjective, but also makes peer review many magnitudes harder than publishing on arxiv.
Even when a well-known professor in number theory praised the paper when I got an endorsement and a second emailed me and and encouraged me to publish it, it still got rejected 3 times and still waiting.
Being required to publish in a peer reviewed journal will close off arxiv for many researchers for good. It also defeats the point of it being a pre-print.
Replies
> ArXiv doesn't even check the submission closely, so how can they know?
They can be informed by people who read the papers and check the citations. A zero-tolerance policy provides an incentive to report sloppy papers (namely, that you can be confident something will be done about it), and each time a paper is removed or an author is banned, it incrementally increases the value of the arXiv as a whole.
> Being required to publish in a peer reviewed journal will close off arxiv for many researchers for good.
At the end of the day, demanding that people carefully proofread their LLM-generated papers before sharing them on the arXiv seems like a relative low bar to clear, and I sort of question whether it's reasonable to call individuals who find it too onerous "researchers" in the first place.
You could at least filter out hallucinated references which simply don't exist pretty trivially, I'd imagine.
You don't need to be actively enforcing a rule 100% on everyone. Speed cameras don't cover every stretch of road either.
It's enough for them to place this policy and enforce it when they become aware of violations. Someone reading the slopped paper (or, here, trying to follow a reference) will notice sooner or later.
> Being required to publish in a peer reviewed journal will close off arxiv for many researchers for good. It also defeats the point of it being a pre-print.
You sound like it's impossible for researchers to write papers without slopped references, and inevitable to get hit by this policy.
This puts the burden to make sure it's right on the submitter, where it should be. Verification can come at any time after that; the submitter understands the consequences of hallucinated references. Verification can be crowd-sourced (and likely will be).
Nothing stops someone from putting a PDF on the internet. I'm fine with ArXiv holding a high standard.