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hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

Before being considered for submission to arXiv's CS category, review articles and position papers must now be accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review [arxiv.org]:

arXiv's computer science (CS) category has updated its moderation practice with respect to review (or survey) articles and position papers. Before being considered for submission to arXiv's CS category, review articles and position papers must now be accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review. When submitting review articles or position papers, authors must include documentation of successful peer review to receive full consideration. Review/survey articles or position papers submitted to arXiv without this documentation will be likely to be rejected and not appear on arXiv.

This change is being implemented due to the unmanageable influx of review articles and position papers to arXiv CS.

[...] In the past few years, arXiv has been flooded with papers. Generative AI / large language models have added to this flood by making papers – especially papers not introducing new research results – fast and easy to write. While categories across arXiv have all seen a major increase in submissions, it's particularly pronounced in arXiv's CS category.

[...] In the past, arXiv CS received a relatively small amount of review or survey articles, and those we did receive were of extremely high quality, written by senior researchers at the request of publications like Annual Reviews, Proceedings of the IEEE, and Computing Surveys. Position paper submissions to arXiv were similarly rare, and usually produced by scientific societies or government study groups (for example,the Computing Research Association of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine). While, as now, these papers were not content types officially accepted by arXiv, the arXiv moderators accepted them because of their scholarly value to the research community.

Fast forward to present day – submissions to arXiv in general have risen dramatically, and we now receive hundreds of review articles every month. The advent of large language models have made this type of content relatively easy to churn out on demand, and the majority of the review articles we receive are little more than annotated bibliographies, with no substantial discussion of open research issues.

arXiv believes that there are position papers and review articles that are of value to the scientific community, and we would like to be able to share them on arXiv. However, our team of volunteer moderators do not have the time or bandwidth to review the hundreds of these articles we receive without taking time away from our core purpose, which is to share research articles.

[...] Each category of arXiv has different moderators, who are subject matter experts with a terminal degree in their particular subject, to best serve the scholarly pursuits, goals, and standards of their category. While all moderators adhere to arXiv policy, the only policy arXiv has in place with regard to review articles and position papers is that they are not a generally accepted content type. The goal of the moderators of each category is to make sure the work being submitted is actually science, and that it is of potential interest to the scientific community. If other categories see a similar rise in LLM-written review articles and position papers, they may choose to change their moderation practices in a similar manner to better serve arXiv authors and readers. We will make these updates public if and when they do occur.

Original Submission