I might be missing something, but I still don't get the why. I don't see any "problem" that needs to be solved.
The reason is because arxiv is growing significantly leading to 297,000 deficit in operating costs for 2025 alone. Corenell has helped with donation a long with other organizations that pay membership fees.
As a result, donors + leaders of arxiv think it's best to spin off to increase funding.
Most people I talk to hate that pipeline and spend a lot of debug hours on it when Arxiv can't compile what overleaf and your local latex install can.
The reason authors like and use arxiv is that it gives 1) a timestamp, 2) a standardized citable ID, and 3) stable hosting of the pdf. And readers like the no-nonsense single click download of the pdf and a barebones consistent website look.
All else is a side show.
Spinning the service off forces other the labor out onto other universities rather than leaving them to solely Cornell
Arxiv doesn't need moderation. Nobody is asking for Arxiv moderation. It needs minimal checks to remove overtly illegal content.
Seems like a lot of people are asking for moderation. And moderation is a pretty big part of the existing offering[1].
This is a motte and bailey fallacy. The real question is about moderation with the goal of checking truth and the scientific content. Obviously illegal content and ddos type overloading attacks need to be blocked.
Very different philosophies are clashing here. Arxiv came about in an age of different zeitgeist. We may never get back to that moment.
No. Around half the cost is infrastructure. The other half of the cost is people. i.e. engineers to maintain infra and build mod tools for moderators to operate.
> Arxiv doesn't need moderation. Nobody is asking for Arxiv moderation.
This is just not true. Tons of people ask for arxiv to have moderation. Especially since covid, etc when antivaxxers and alternative medicine peddlers started trying to pump the medical categories of arxiv with quack science preprints and then go on to use the arxiv preprint and its DOI to take advantage of non academics who don't really understand what arxiv is other than it looks vaguely like a journal.
And doubly so now that people keep submitting AI generated slop papers to the service trying to flood the different categories so they can pad their resumes or CVs. And on top of that people who don't actually understand the fields they are trying to write papers in using AI to generate "innovative papers" that are completely nonsensical but vaguely parroting the terms of art.
The only reason you don't see more people calling for arxiv moderation is because they already spend so much time on it. If they were to stop moderating the site it would overflow into an absolute nightmare of garbage near overnight. And people wouldn't be upset with the users uploading this of course, they'd be upset with arxiv for failing to take action.
Moderation is inherently unappreciated because in the ideal form it should be effectively invisible (which arxiv's mostly is).
If you want to see the type of stuff that arxiv keeps out, go over to ViXrA [1] or you can watch k-theory's video [2] having fun digging through some of the quality posts that live over on that site.
Also, the "human review" is a simple moderation process [1]. It usually does not dig into the submission's scientific merits.
A critical component of the arXiv-CE project is moving our services entirely off of Cornell University’s infrastructure — this goal is also known as Milestone 1. Milestone 1 completion is projected for the end of fiscal year 2026.
Assume if you are a library, and every day, half baked so-called books brought to the librarians where they have to make sure it is meaningful, readable and printable, 3000 of them, they accept and put them in the right bookshelf, and entire internet reads every one of them on the shelf multiple times by the AI bots, search engines and researchers.
They are not only making a new library, they are also maintaining both and syncing two libraries because Cornell cannot handle the volume of access by bots.
It is not static. It is essentially running two ships side-by-side, and two ships need to appear as one from the outside. And, the new ship is still only half built. The new ship is being designed, and being built. 27 seems small to me.
I've contracted into some consultancy teams which you could uncharitably describe as "15 people and $4mn/yr to create one PDF per month".
Dollars? So 300 people's cable bill? That's basically nothing. They're spending too much, and it's still nothing, and the solution is going to be to privatize it and eventually loot it.
You can't hand out a collection plate and get $300K for Arxiv? Your local neighborhood church can. Civilization is obviously collapsing.