ArXiv receives $10M for upgrades

I am really glad arXiv is getting more funding. It is an essential resource.<p>For me personally, it’ll be really interesting to see if the frontend changes. No doubt there are some important improvements that can be made (a website can always be made more accessible, moderation tools, support for name changes as mentioned, etc.) However, to first approximation, arXiV’s website already seems almost like a platonic ideal. It reminds me of Craigslist. Simple HTML, loads fast, has the information and features you need but otherwise gets out of your way. I love it.<p>The arXiv team deserves a lot of credit for what they’ve done to get it this far. It’s difficult to overstate how useful and transformative preprint servers have been to science.

Some people are angry that arXiv which is probably the most important repository of science are getting public funding because big tech companies are using it to publish their work, and they should fund that from their deep buckets. Are you aware of the consequences of what you are suggesting?<p>If you are funding something, you have some authority over what you are funding. Directly or even indirectly (If you don&#x27;t follow our suggestions, we might revisit our financial contribution). So you want to put the place that should be open and independent under the thump of corporations that does not always have the same goals as the benefit of the science and public interest?

&gt; arXiv was founded in 1991 by then-Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist Paul Ginsparg, Ph.D. ’81, prior to his return to Cornell in 2001.<p>I had no idea arXiv was that old. I honestly only heard of it and started using it less than 10 years ago.

Prediction: Arxiv has no need of this money, as it has no need of upgrades. This money will exclusively attract salesman, all of whom will offer to make arxiv worse, for money. One of them might succeed

&gt; migrate to the cloud<p>Oh great, looking forward to a captcha every time I download a paper.<p>(FWIW, arXiv is one place I trust not to make such stupid decisions, but migrating to a cloud often means the decisions are no longer made in-house...)

Arxiv is a blessing, I would not be where I am without Arxiv and all the folks openly sharing their research.<p>I don’t like that deepmind gates their research behind nature and other publications. I acknowledge it puts them in the cool kids club but it feels unauthentic. Putting research out in the open moves humanity forward.<p>Arxiv can say it made a little dent in the universe and I’m glad it’s getting the funding it needs to be sustainable.<p>I just hope they don’t burn it out trying to scale needlessly.

Oh that’s great to hear! I really like arXiv and am glad it’s getting more funding! I hope this will enable arXiv to fix some of the long-time issues it has, including the way identity and attribution are handled.<p>For example: the current system assumes people’s names do not change [1], which in particular negatively affects trans authors. This seems like it could be fixed if they had the bandwidth to, and I hope they will.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kalzumeus.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;06&#x2F;17&#x2F;falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kalzumeus.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;06&#x2F;17&#x2F;falsehoods-programmers-...</a>

arXiv is a great resource. At least in my field (Programming Languages, but I imagine it applies to most if not all of Computer Science) it seems like most papers are on arXiv.<p>I see no reason to not make papers free. Most things cost money because either they&#x27;re material themselves, or cost money&#x2F;material to produce which needs to be somehow recouped. But papers cost almost $0 to distribute <i>and</i> are created with grants which get funded by the results and discoveries themselves.

Is moving something that has a seriously tight budget, to the cloud, necessarily a good idea?

Make the papers web-native!

I’m 100% on board with open source science.

I hope they just use the money for more bandwidth and maybe spend it on free api&#x2F;download access so people can get big chunks of it easily and build all kinds of things (from alert on keyword to just stream of text to finetune models)<p>And I hope they don&#x27;t touch the frontend at all :)

Hope it stretches to installing a TeX distribution that properly supports Unicode ...

I wonder if they could use some of it to make an experimental post-publication review system. I&#x27;m not sure what the future of peer review is, but I doubt it would hurt for them to try.

Why do you need $10M to host some PDFs?

Good call. Surprised it’s not more given its value as (among other things) AI corpus.

Great. BioRxiv comverts pdf to html. I hope arxiv does that too.

Perhaps that means they can set the PDF title tag :)

Internet movie pirates have been using bittorrent for 20 years. I think there is fraud here.

This will raise the entire world&#x27;s GDP by at least 2%.

$10M to host a listing of pdfs. lol let me do it.

$10M seems way too much - if it&#x27;s per year. Call me paranoid, but that kind of money invites the ESG crowd.

Why is this eating up NSF money &#x2F; taxpayer money?! Megacaps like Google and Facebook are reaping tons of value from arXiv, i.e. (1) easy access to non-industry peer attention through a respected pre-print publisher, (2) major incentive to their employees and key component to performance review cycle, ...<p>Google itself has out-published most universities in conferences like NeurIPS for the past few years. For Google alone to match the $10m would be a drop in the bucket-- a $10m grant would be an order of magnitude less than the compensation they&#x27;re paying to their own employees who make heavy use of arXiv.<p>NSF funds are scarce, precious, and it&#x27;s immensely hard for lawmakers to divert funding to NSF versus e.g. defense. One thing arXiv needs is high-quality bandwidth and Google &#x2F; Facebook have tons of that. Taxpayers are already paying tons for Google&#x27;s several anti-trust trials, no need waste NSF budget for something industry can very very easily solve.