As an academic and regular submitter to arXiv, this is an eminently sensible policy. I like that it's per-submitter and not per-author, that means that the big labs with large collaborations shouldn't be terribly put out (more authors = more submission budget).
I hope something like this could also be adopted for some of our larger conferences - the absolute limits on co-authorship are what seem to cause the most grumbles.
> In September of 2016, arXiv received 9,869 submissions. In September of 2024, arXiv received 20,569 submissions. This September, arXiv received 40,363 submissions, which in turn generated almost 9,000 support tickets for arXiv staff and moderators.
> arXiv now limits submitters to up to two submissions per calendar month, with a limit of three total active submissions at any given time.
Nice writeup and the policy is a step in the right direction. I suspect simple rate-limit measures like this will be a big improvement.
I suspect a logical conclusion Arxiv and elsewhere may be an identity management system with an aggressive filter, and shared blacklists. I suspect that classifying people as spam/slop-submitters, then banning them (or whatever identity they used; name, email, name + organization etc), applying incremental rate limits over the general one, may be required.
It doesn't seem humanly possible to produce >2 "high SNR" papers per month. If you have a larger batch of related papers, it's easy to spread submissions over multiple months. You should probably be doing that anyway, because comments on one paper may affect the others.
> It doesn't seem humanly possible to produce >2 "high SNR" papers per month.
The situation right now is pretty crazy, for example this established TCS professor [1] has at least 4 arXiv submissions co-authored by him in September [2]. This includes the recent breakthrough on the matroid secretary problem, which has a pretty interesting AI story of its own, if you haven't seen it yet [3].
Of course prolific professors can work around this by working with younger researchers who upload the work, but this just makes the rate limit a solo author bottleneck, which feels a bit weird.
[3]: Concurrent Discovery Disclosure: The proof of the main result in this manuscript was obtained in a conversation with ChatGPT-6 Astra on Tuesday, September 15, 2026 at 1:02 AM PDT. We then prepared this manuscript for public release, with the intent of uploading it on the morning of Thursday, September 17, 2026. In the early morning hours of September 17, while finalizing the submission, we discovered the manuscript of Abdi, Banihashem, Hajiaghayi, and Mittal, uploaded on September 16, 2026, which contains the same result via an essentially identical approach. We are sharing our manuscript nonetheless in case our exposition is of independent utility to the community, and we hope this experience stimulates broader discussion about concurrent discovery in the AI era. (From https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20797 .)
The situation is pretty crazy, but it just means the bar for publishable results will go up. Theoretical computer science is a field built around conferences. The number of papers that can be published in reputable conferences ultimately depends on the size of the community and the willingness and ability of its members to attend those conferences.
I don't see what we lose if lead authors are forced to submit work themselves instead of going through the PI's account.
But yes, it'd be nice if arxiv also rate-limited co-author submissions with some higher number to discourage the most flagrant PI co-authorship abuses.
Insane. No. Mathematicians will not produce >2 "high SNR" papers per month as their rate calculated over any reasonable time scale; but their maximum per month? Very much the case that they will complete linked papers/dependencies/series of work/etc, spend a month in editing across multiple nearly-complete submissions, and so on.
And in mathematics, at least, priority on results is determined by the first time it appears out in the wild; for most, this is the arXiv.
Nobody is going to accept waiting a month on something that they fear may be scooped, costing them years of work and thought.
This affectively makes the arXiv obsolete for much of the purpose it has heretofore been put to.
Do you have a concrete example of a high SNR researcher who will be limited by this policy? Aka one who is submitting more than two high quality papers per month?
As an academic and regular submitter to arXiv, this is an eminently sensible policy. I like that it's per-submitter and not per-author, that means that the big labs with large collaborations shouldn't be terribly put out (more authors = more submission budget).
I hope something like this could also be adopted for some of our larger conferences - the absolute limits on co-authorship are what seem to cause the most grumbles.
some highlights:
> In September of 2016, arXiv received 9,869 submissions. In September of 2024, arXiv received 20,569 submissions. This September, arXiv received 40,363 submissions, which in turn generated almost 9,000 support tickets for arXiv staff and moderators.
> arXiv now limits submitters to up to two submissions per calendar month, with a limit of three total active submissions at any given time.
Nice writeup and the policy is a step in the right direction. I suspect simple rate-limit measures like this will be a big improvement.
I suspect a logical conclusion Arxiv and elsewhere may be an identity management system with an aggressive filter, and shared blacklists. I suspect that classifying people as spam/slop-submitters, then banning them (or whatever identity they used; name, email, name + organization etc), applying incremental rate limits over the general one, may be required.
This will just force high SNR Posters to other platforms. ArXiv is rate limiting itself out of relevance.
Any example of high SNR authors who consistently putting more than 2 papers months after months after months for this to be a problem?
It doesn't seem humanly possible to produce >2 "high SNR" papers per month. If you have a larger batch of related papers, it's easy to spread submissions over multiple months. You should probably be doing that anyway, because comments on one paper may affect the others.
> It doesn't seem humanly possible to produce >2 "high SNR" papers per month.
The situation right now is pretty crazy, for example this established TCS professor [1] has at least 4 arXiv submissions co-authored by him in September [2]. This includes the recent breakthrough on the matroid secretary problem, which has a pretty interesting AI story of its own, if you haven't seen it yet [3].
Of course prolific professors can work around this by working with younger researchers who upload the work, but this just makes the rate limit a solo author bottleneck, which feels a bit weird.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Hajiaghayi
[2]: https://arxiv.org/search/cs?query=Hajiaghayi&searchtype=auth...
[3]: Concurrent Discovery Disclosure: The proof of the main result in this manuscript was obtained in a conversation with ChatGPT-6 Astra on Tuesday, September 15, 2026 at 1:02 AM PDT. We then prepared this manuscript for public release, with the intent of uploading it on the morning of Thursday, September 17, 2026. In the early morning hours of September 17, while finalizing the submission, we discovered the manuscript of Abdi, Banihashem, Hajiaghayi, and Mittal, uploaded on September 16, 2026, which contains the same result via an essentially identical approach. We are sharing our manuscript nonetheless in case our exposition is of independent utility to the community, and we hope this experience stimulates broader discussion about concurrent discovery in the AI era. (From https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20797 .)
The situation is pretty crazy, but it just means the bar for publishable results will go up. Theoretical computer science is a field built around conferences. The number of papers that can be published in reputable conferences ultimately depends on the size of the community and the willingness and ability of its members to attend those conferences.
I don't see what we lose if lead authors are forced to submit work themselves instead of going through the PI's account.
But yes, it'd be nice if arxiv also rate-limited co-author submissions with some higher number to discourage the most flagrant PI co-authorship abuses.
Insane. No. Mathematicians will not produce >2 "high SNR" papers per month as their rate calculated over any reasonable time scale; but their maximum per month? Very much the case that they will complete linked papers/dependencies/series of work/etc, spend a month in editing across multiple nearly-complete submissions, and so on.
And in mathematics, at least, priority on results is determined by the first time it appears out in the wild; for most, this is the arXiv.
Nobody is going to accept waiting a month on something that they fear may be scooped, costing them years of work and thought.
This affectively makes the arXiv obsolete for much of the purpose it has heretofore been put to.
Arxiv has had a limit of 3 simultaneous submissions for a couple years now. This is only adding per-month limits.
Do you have a concrete example of a high SNR researcher who will be limited by this policy? Aka one who is submitting more than two high quality papers per month?
I imagine they could augment it with giving higher rates for some people based on things like h-index.
It's pushing slop elsewhere.