If you know the authors of your specific area of research, arXiv is a nice way to read their new papers when they are (mostly) done but the submission to a journal is not finished yet.

Do people browse arxiv or monitor new posts like reddit or something? I only visit when I encounter a link to it or when I search for a specific paper.

One growing role, especially in mathematics, is that of a host for "overlay journals": https://www.insmi.cnrs.fr/en/cnrsinfo/epijournaux-en-mathema...

I really like the idea. In short: arXiv, HAL and similar sites host the papers without any peer review (short of perhaps stopping crank spam) or access control. They're freely available to anyone. Authors then submit arXiv IDs (or similar) to the reviewers of "overlay journals", which then review and accept or not. The overlay journal accepts a paper by just adding it to its list of accepted arXiv identifiers, and that's that.

This ensures accessibility for all, keeps peer review, yet takes a lot of the practical hurdles away from actually running a journal. A journal can now just be a group of people who give thumbs up or down to arXiv identifiers, and if that group's conclusion start having weight in the community then it's become an important journal. Maybe they give away their listings for free, maybe they charge to read the reviews – it's really up to them what the business model (if any) will be.

It's really nice.

Well, some blog posts are worth citing.

Actually arXiv is frustrating from an open access angel. It is very much possible to put up documents without open licensing so the content is not always fulfilling the open access definition.

Peer review WAS vital for a long time. Maybe the world looks different now, maybe LLMs can find value in things better than humans. When you make an assumption it's good to think about why you do so, in this case it seems to be for historical reasons.

It is also valuable for scientists as it is often a 'directors cut' version of the paper. Journal submissions are heavy edited and shortened to fit into the page limits.

That would be a trap. It's healthier for a non-profit to have many small funders than a few large ones.

Papers submitted to arXiv under its most permissive license should always be free, as in beer, speech, freedom. For researchers that contribute to it, that is the intention for a reason. It is to serve public and corporate good without restriction.

This isn't me siding with AI companies by the way; it's a slippery slope argument.

as if they would pay.... they would pirate the contents as they already did

I volunteered for a project [1] with roughly this philosophy. Traditional publishing currently serves three purposes:

- Organise peer feedback - Publish the work - Recognise good work, helping with both discovery and credit

That latter part especially is what allows publishers to charge the ridiculous markup that they do.

But with "modern" technology, feedback and publishing really doesn't require all that infrastructure - email and arXiv can easily be used to self-organise that. So we built a system of recognition that does not block publication, and can be used as a layer on top of arXiv and any other venue, allowing peers to vouch ("endorse") for a work.

I had even proposed and implemented an integration for arXiv Labs that got accepted, but then never merged. I should follow up on that...

[1] https://plaudit.pub/

>3. It puts the effort on the readers to decide whether each paper is valuable, and particularly scientifically valuable, for which most readers will be unequipped.

You say it as if replication crisis doesn't exist and publish or perish is not a thing.

You can even combine arXiv and peer review very neatly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48744030

openai had billionaire "donors" who understood the company was going to operate as a PBC with a positive return for them instead of a true nonprofit.

the heel turn to unlimited for profit was only possible because of their unique structure and the fact they were already selling commercial products. arxiv is not selling anything so theres no financial incentive to take over.