---
title: "ArXiv"
chunk: 2/2
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:48:34.832856+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Moderation process and endorsement ==
Although arXiv is not peer reviewed, a collection of moderators for each area review the submissions; they may recategorize any that are deemed off-topic, or reject submissions that are not scientific papers, or sometimes for undisclosed reasons. The lists of moderators for many sections of arXiv are publicly available, but moderators for most of the physics sections remain unlisted. In addition to human moderators, all submissions are checked via an automated quality control process, ensuring a baseline standard of professionalism. 
Additionally, an "endorsement" system was introduced in 2004 as part of an effort to ensure content is relevant and of interest to current research in the specified disciplines. Under the system, for categories that use it, an author must be endorsed by an established arXiv author before being allowed to submit papers to those categories. Endorsers are not asked to review the paper for errors but to check whether the paper is appropriate for the intended subject area. New authors from recognized academic institutions generally receive automatic endorsement, which in practice means that they do not need to deal with the endorsement system at all. However, the endorsement system has attracted criticism for allegedly restricting scientific inquiry.
A majority of the e-prints are also submitted to journals for publication, but some work, including some very influential papers, remain purely as e-prints and are never published in a peer-reviewed journal. A well-known example of the latter is an outline of a proof of Thurston's geometrization conjecture, including the Poincaré conjecture as a particular case, uploaded by Grigori Perelman in November 2002. Perelman appears content to forgo the traditional peer-reviewed journal process, stating: "If anybody is interested in my way of solving the problem, it's all there [on the arXiv] – let them go and read about it". Despite this non-traditional method of publication, other mathematicians recognized this work by offering the Fields Medal and Clay Mathematics Millennium Prizes to Perelman, both of which he refused.
While arXiv does contain some dubious e-prints, such as those claiming to refute famous theorems or proving famous conjectures such as Fermat's Last Theorem using only high-school mathematics, a 2002 article which appeared in Notices of the American Mathematical Society described those as "surprisingly rare". arXiv generally re-classifies these works, e.g. in "General mathematics", rather than deleting them; however, some authors have voiced concern over the lack of transparency in the arXiv screening process.
In November 2025, arXiv announced that it would no longer accept computer science review articles and position papers that had not been vetted by an academic journal or conference due to an increase in AI-generated research. arXiv stated that these sources “were never officially on arXiv’s list of ‘accepted content types’”, and before submitting to arXiv, review articles and position papers should be accepted by a peer-reviewed journal or conference with reference and DOI metadata. However, arXiv does not accept articles from conference workshops, as they do not “meet the same standard of rigor of traditional peer review”.

=== Withdrawn preprints ===
It has been reported that 14,000 preprints have been withdrawn at arXiv, most commonly due to "crucial errors". A lesser number of the withdrawals were due to the preprint being subsumed by another publication. The report itself was posted at arXiv December, 2024.

== Submission formats ==
Papers can be submitted in any of several formats, including LaTeX, and PDF printed from a word processor other than TeX or LaTeX. The submission is rejected by the arXiv software if generating the final PDF file fails, if any image file is too large, or if the total size of the submission is too large. arXiv now allows one to store and modify an incomplete submission, and only finalize the submission when ready. The time stamp on the article is set when the submission is finalized.

== Access ==

The standard access route is through the arxiv.org website, which is publicly accessible and does not require an account. Other interfaces and access routes have also been created by other un-associated organisations.
Metadata for arXiv is made available through OAI-PMH, the standard for open access repositories. Content is therefore indexed in all major consumers of such data, such as BASE, CORE and Unpaywall. As of 2020, the Unpaywall dump links over 500,000 arXiv URLs as the open access version of a work found in CrossRef data from the publishers, making arXiv a top 10 global host of green open access.
Finally, researchers can select sub-fields and receive daily e-mailings or RSS feeds of all submissions in them.

== Copyright status of files ==
Files on arXiv can have a number of different copyright statuses:

Some are public domain, in which case they will have a statement saying so.
Some are available under either the Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution-ShareAlike license or the Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license.
Some are copyright to the publisher, but the author has the right to distribute them and has given arXiv a non-exclusive irrevocable license to distribute them.
Most are copyright to the author, and arXiv has only a non-exclusive irrevocable license to distribute them.

== See also ==
List of preprint repositories

== Citations ==

== General and cited sources ==

== External links ==

Official website