ArXiv will no longer accept review or position papers in computer science unless they have already been peer reviewed.Credit: Sharaf Maksumov/Alamy
The oldest and best-known preprint repository, arXiv, has announced that it will no longer accept review or position papers in computer science. The website will make exceptions only for papers that have been previously accepted by a peer-reviewed venue, such as a journal or conference.
These types of article were never officially on arXiv’s list of ‘accepted content types’, but they had previously been allowed at moderator discretion, said a blog post announcing the move on 31 October. arXiv management says the move was made necessary by a surge in low-quality papers, including many that appear to be written using generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
“I think this is a wise move by arXiv,” says Richard Sever, chief science and strategy officer of the non-profit organisation openRxiv in New York City, which runs the biomedical-sciences preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv. He adds both of those platforms have had a ‘no narrative reviews’ policy from the outset.
Rising rejection rates
Preprints submitted to arXiv are checked by automated tools. Before going live on the site, around 20% of submissions are flagged to one of 240 volunteer moderators, says arXiv executive director Ramin Zabih, a computer scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Until a year ago, only 2–3% of submissions were ultimately rejected by moderators, says Steinn Sigurðsson, an astrophysicist at Penn State University in University Park who is arXiv’s scientific director. But in the last year, that number has gone up to 10%.
AI content is tainting preprints: how moderators are fighting back
