ArXiv provides such an easy interface to navigate scientific papers, most are from computer science of course. Hope they can grow bigger and solve the paywall pain in open research. Any implication to Bioxiv?

This sounds terrible. Of course there's a huge risk of it becoming made for-profit. It almost makes you wonder if the academic publishers are behind this push somehow.

Could they not have made it into some legal structure that puts universities at the top? Say, with a bunch of universities owning shares that comprise the entirety of the ownership of arXiv, but that would allow arXiv to independently raise funds?

I wonder if there are plans to licence the content for AI training

What is worrisome about this development, and corollary actions like the hiring of a CEO with a $300,000/year salary, is that the essentially independent and community based platform will disappear. The ArXiv exists because mathematicians and physicists, and later computer scientists and engineers, posted there, freely, their work, with minimal attention to licensing and other commercial aspects. It has thrived because it required no peer review and made interesting things accessible quickly to whomever cared to read them.

A setup as a US-based "non-profit" is worrisome, if only because 300K is an obscene salary even in a for-profit setting. That the US-based posters can't see this is evidence of the basic problem which is that the US, both left and right, has been taken over by a neoliberal feudal antidemocratic nativist mindset that is anathema to the sort of free interchange of ideas that underlay the ArXiv's development in the hands of mathematicians and physicists now swept aside and ignored by machine learning grifters and technicians who program computers.

I fear their Mozilla-ification and Wikipedia-ification. Scope creep, various outreach feel-good programs, ballooning costs, lost focus etc. And other types of enshittification.

Any change to the basic premise will be a negative step.

They should just be boring quiet unopininionated neutral background infrastructure.

Do research papers published on Elsevier's sort of media remain more prestigious?

I read a dozen papers a month, typically on arxiv, never from paywalled journals. I find the quality on par. But maybe I'm missing something.

And they hired a LinkedIn business idiot to run the new organization - so the aim is for an infinite growth tech startup in terms of governance, despite the technical legal status of non-profit. It shows in the language they use in the announcement, too ("improved financial viability in the long run")

OpenAI shows exactly how well that works and what that kind of governance does to a company and to its support of science and the commons.

TL;DR, it's fucked.

Maybe they should implement a graph based trust system:

You need your favourite academic gatekeeper (= thesis advisor) to vouch for you in order to be allowed to upload.

Then AI slop gets flagged and the shame spreads through the graph. And flaggings need to have evidence attached that can again be flagged.

we got this before gta 6

This is exactly what happened last time when scientific publishing got cornered. Journals run by departments and research groups were spun out or sold off to publishers and independent orgs. And they continued to slowly boil the frog over 50 years with fees and gate keeping.

Its especially problematic because while ArXiv love to claim to be working for open science, they don't default to open licensing. Much of the publications they host are not Open Access, and are only read access. So there is definitely the potential to close things off at some point in the future, when some CEO need to increase value.