ArXiv's Updated Rate Limit Policy
arXiv and the broader scientific community are facing a watershed moment as scholarly publishing changes rapidly and researchers transform how they communicate results. Before AI, there was a practical limit on how many independent submissions could be produced, and arXiv's volunteer moderators would limit submitters well above that threshold. With more advanced and accessible AI tools, that practical limit is now up for debate.
As of October 1, 2026, arXiv is instituting an updated rate-limiting policy across all submitters and categories. The policy is described as a stopgap while arXiv determines what may become best practice for authors using increasingly advanced AI tools, and to give the organization time to improve its moderation tools and procedures.
Open access repositories are seeing a sharp increase in submissions per author per month. arXiv received 9,869 submissions in September 2016 and 20,569 in September 2024. This September, it received 40,363 submissions—a new record—which generated almost 9,000 support tickets for arXiv staff and moderators. Submissions have doubled in only the past two years and have risen steadily since arXiv's founding in 1991.
Advanced AI tools are helping drive these increases by making certain aspects of research faster and easier. arXiv policy permits authors to use AI as a tool in support of their research if it is disclosed and the research meets arXiv's standards of scholarly interest and advances the field. However, many current submissions do not satisfy those requirements. Moderators are observing an increase in thin papers of narrow scope, salami papers where a single work is broken into a set of smaller papers, and dense AI-written papers. AI tools are making it easy to flood arXiv and other repositories with these low-value papers. Over the past two years, cs.AI has seen over a 6X increase in submissions, while other arXiv categories have doubled.
The heart of arXiv's process for detecting and rejecting low-quality papers is its many volunteer moderators, whose donated time and expertise arXiv says it is grateful for. A relatively small proportion of authors are submitting a large number of low-quality papers and consuming a disproportionate fraction of moderators' time, which is unfair to authors who continue to submit quality papers because their papers can be delayed for days or weeks. The item is attributed to Thomas Dietterich, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Oregon.