The pace of things is moving along so rapidly right now, I’m not sure that waiting for peer reviews is always a wise move. Doubly so if there’s a paywall; why limit your article’s impact by placing it where practitioners’ agents might not be able to access it? The rapid progress right now is challenging for conventional academic processes.
If the value of the paper is difficult to independently verify, for example, if it depends on the credibility of the author, then the academic ritual can add something. If it’s a mathematical result, one that can be automatically verified, or a machine learning technique that anyone can try with Claude code reconstructing it for them, this sort of pre-print publishing model is advantageous.
Because...science? It's not science until it passes peer review.
I'm not advocating that everybody stops posting to arXiv, and I'm not saying you can't find good stuff there. I'm just saying, it's a vanity press, there is absolutely no guarantee of the paper's quality.
And being published by a famous professor from a prestigious university is also no guarantee. If we've learned anything from the non-reproducibility crisis, it is that a paper's origin story is no guarantee.
We all know that science is about experiments and evidence whereas peer review is a social process.
Confusing science with peer review is very unscientific. Galileo’s work did not pass the dominant socio-scientific review process of his day and we all know how that turned out. Peer review serves a purpose but peer review is not science per se — unless, perhaps, your field is sociology, and you study the social processes of science practitioners, so that peer review outcomes are the evidence that you use to study those social processes.
Peer reviewers don't generally reproduce the work in the publications they are asked to review, at least not during the review process itself. Neither do journal editors.
If you want a real vanity press, check vixra and its origin story.
ArXiv does have moderators and endorsers in each area, although they are usually light-touch, weeding out literally unreadable submissions, ones that so obviously ignore formatting guidelines that it beggars belief they could comply with a typical journal's rules, and ones that are clearly submitted to the wrong area.
Having a stable document early (a pre-print) tends to widen the scrutiny of papers that may ultimately be published to a journal whose editor's expertise lies in a very different area from the submission; this can and does lead to author corrections being made before journal publication.
There are plenty of peer-reviewed papers which are hot garbage that have found their way into prestigious high-impact journals like Nature and Science (see <https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-leaderboard...> for examples, and note none of the top 10 are in areas covered by the arXiv).
> being published by a famous professor from a prestigious university is also no guarantee
Everyone in academia knows this, including the vast majority of famous professors from prestigious universities, because of online repositories like <https://retractionwatch.com/retractions-by-nobel-prize-winne...> (and much more sadly because of <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease>, lower-profile versions of which academic paper-writers -- and dissertation writers -- tend to encounter as they chase the history of the problem before them or read late citations to works they are relying upon). This particular part of your set of claims is is not a real problem in academia or with the arXiv in particular.
Finally, what value does publication in a predatory journal bring? Do you believe that peer review and editing were actually even performed in the majority of MDPI's most predatory journals, for example? <https://www.predatoryjournals.org/news/list-of-all-mdpi-pred...> Some papers published in some of their pay-for-publication open access journals don't even get submitted to the arXiv; one might hope this is out of embarrassment by the authors, although the (low) bar set by the arXiv itself is certainly a factor.
The remedy for a reasonably argued but wrong academic paper isn't lack of publication, failed peer review, or editorial alteration, but rather reply papers. That's the academic dialogue.
Thanks for this reply, your points are well taken and it really got me to think about this stuff.
I suppose you could view arxiv as being a way to let more people do a peer review on the papers, i.e. as one component of a more open and transparent peer review process. As such, it is certainly a welcome alternative to what the snootier journal reviews do, which is to put off reading your paper for a year, and then spend about 50 seconds looking for a reason to say "no".
But I had a narrow point to make when I said that arxiv is a vanity press: just because something is on there doesn't guarantee that it is correct, or even useful. It is a vanity press in the sense that it will publish pretty much anything--modulo obscenity and porn laws, and apparently also some sanity checking by arxiv moderators--but so does a vanity press for print books.
To your point of predatory journals, power-broker reviewers and such, yes, I have done my fair share of suffering from them. It slows down good research and passes through bad research. The system is badly in need of reform, and arxiv gives a much needed alternative.
But really, the problem is (as one of my profs said) that science is totally run on volunteer, unpaid labor. Peer reviewers are very busy, get paid nothing, it is mostly a distraction. This leads them to look for other ways of being compensated--e.g. the can try to be a power broker, a feared authority, etc.
The real solution would be to actually pay peer reviewers and fund them so they can actually reproduce the results. Here's how it could work: when a researcher submits a grant proposal, they budget for enough money to fund the research and enough money to peer review and reproduce it. If the research isn't good enough to warrant an attempt to validate it, then it isn't worth doing in the first place.
Thanks. Nobody ever admits when they are wrong on the internet, so I'm trying to be the change I want to see.
W.R.T. the grand historical tradition, etc, note that the great majority of people who practiced that were, like Plato, independently wealthy and otherwise idle. Those who didn't need any money.
That's why we give Judges, teachers, and Professors tenure, a guaranteed job for life. People are more likely to be fair judges of other people's performance when they don't need the money.
So I guess if you want a non-conservative fix, it would be universal guaranteed minimum income. Something we already have, BTW, but you have to be over 62 to get it.
We've tried to open it up to more than just the 1%, but we didn't really go all the way. It is really unreasonable to expect somebody who isn't independently wealthy to do free work. It is a lot of work to properly review a paper, and reproducing the results is something you simply can't do at all if you are supposed to already be working 70 hours a week generating your own research.
Of course a researcher paying reviewers would be a disastrous idea. But if the grant-awarding body would hire 3rd parties to validate that their money was actually well spent, I think it would be a win/win.
Thanks for the references on where paying reviewers has already been tried. I'd like to see others reproduce their success :-)
No paper is guaranteed to be completely accurate and correct at the time of publication; the remedy for honest errors is follow-on papers by the original authors or others in the field putting their names to formalized counter-arguments.
This is how the academic dialogue works, and it dates back to early durable records in the ancient world -- about as far before Plato as Plato's Academy is before today's universities. Innovations like academic journals come from "merely" four centuries ago, and pre-publication evaluation by peers about three hundred years ago. Anonymized pre-publication review is more recent still, and publishing schedules (as well as the needs of the submitter to have the submitted work dealt with in good time) don't admit a dialogue over some subtle point a referee takes some issue with. Moreover, such a pre-publication dialogue is generally non-public, and often also filtered through an editor. It can get messy [1].
As I'm sure you've discovered in your own post-secondary education, academia is very conservative (in the sense of "retaining what mostly works, even in the face of mounting scaling problems", foremost among those being the ever-increasing volume of publishable works generated by researchers).
Direct compensation of referees by journals has a number of pitfalls ranging from the fiddly details of how to deal with income tax liability pay (and credits towards future publication fees, etc) incurs to whether it compromises the objectivity of pre-publication evaluation (which is frankly already not very good in highly specialized areas).
Payment of reviewers by paper submitters is imho an even worse idea -- how do you preserve the anonymity of referees (especially with respect to the submitters)? Do submitters or reviewers have exposure to their (probably different) tax authorities for these transactions? (I can think of at least four national tax agencies that would view the received pay as taxable income, and also potentially subject to value-added tax on professional services. One already sees this problem with conference honoraria.)
Another -- one that already exists in the real world -- might be for institutions and grant-funders to build in support for peer review of others' work by project members. To the extent that detailed pre-publication review benefits academia, and societies that fund academia, as a whole, maybe referees should be rewarded (or even obliged) to do paid reviewing duty. One might compare the requirement to do pro bono work imposed on many practising lawyers by their regulating authorities (especially interesting are jurisdictions in which a party losing a court contest to a party represented pro bono usually must pay into a fund that supports the overall scheme).
Personally I think it would be more useful to everyone to have a solid reply paper published in due course than a blocked initial publication. My ideal is that referees aim to help submitters not accidentally professionally embarrass themselves.
Then on your reproduction idée fixe, supporting the generation of papers which confirm reproduction is something that societies could certainly work on. Many incentives to write and submit papers calling out flaws in others' work already exist, and of course could be expanded. I don't think any of that should be done with masking of the participants. Additionally, reproduction of results is often less interesting than (sometimes much) later testing of published results in significantly different ways.
(Indeed, foundational papers from more than ninety years ago are often re-proven by modern-day experiments, both as a side effect of (or opportunity arising from) pursuing the primary research goal, and as a way of testing e.g. new metrology technology, new computational tools, mathematical advances, and so on. Also, some of those foundational papers simply could not be tested with great accuracy with tools existing at the time of publication. Their publication, however, tended to drive the development of such tools, and in modern days such foundational papers are found to be good only within certain limits that could not have been explored closer to the time of publication.)
If we figure out low-energy fusion for economical lab-origin gold, imagine what businesses would close if that were to happen.
The transmutations are possible, it’s just that the energy currently required is worth more than the gold would be. Colder fusion -> cheaper lab-origin gold.
Fair enough. Models tend to be imperfect, and music theory is definitely no exception to that rule, and we attempt to model music because we care about the underlying phenomenon (music).
As someone who enjoys listening to music, creating music, and music theory, I'd characterize the latter as providing a specialized vocabulary; an approach to listening, since words in the vocabulary represent concepts that you can hear; and a toolbox of concepts you can draw from.
It's a model, you can use it as much or as little as you like. And there's more than one model, and sometimes the different models overlap more or less, and you can choose any of them or none of them and still make and enjoy music.
The other thing it provides is a wildly complex logical system with fascinating philosophical connections. Some people enjoy exploring that more than making music with it, and that's also okay. I've certainly gotten a lot of enjoyment out of that. It's made me a better thinker. In math, formulas can be elegant. In music theory, different constructions induce different experiences.
Fair points, I should probably disclose that my comment is perhaps one of those "looking like I'm giving advice to other people but really just giving advice to myself" kind of comments :)
I have began learning instruments before and fell into the trap of asking too many "why" questions and then just got lost in music theory that a) didn't make too much logical sense and b) didn't help me actually get better at an instrument in any way.
I think it's very unlike programming where you could start with a hello world program and keep asking "why does it work like that" questions and keep getting deeper and deeper and actually end up with a very good understanding of computers by the end of it that actually would make you a better programmer.
But when you're learning an instrument I think perhaps at the start it's better to just accept that "chords sound good because they just do" rather than going off down a complete rabbit hole.
Yes, I agree, the rabbit hole is real. It has taken many people away from their initial intention of making music. If you're a musician first and foremost, music theory can be a trap. Although, Alice in Wonderland also shows us the intrinsic value of a good rabbit hole.
Edit: Also, what you mention about "why" is true. The models attempt to organize observations of conscious experiences into mathematical and logical frameworks, though they cannot ultimately explain the causes for those connections. The causes of the qualia remain mysterious. Musicians tend to be particularly in tune with how their own experiences connect to music, so some are enthralled to explore that connection itself.
I think the internet makes this worse because I've noticed a lot of music content on youtube is theory related. But I think that's probably because of this bias the internet in general has of "you only see videos about things it's possible to make content about". What I mean by that is it's not possible to make a 10 minute video on "just sit down and play your instrument". But you can make 50 videos on theory.
Don't know if this phenomenon has a name, but I've thought about it before. Social media is filled with posts of people buying things. Because it's not really possible to make a video showing off something you decided not to buy. Same thing with music and people constantly buying gear. "I'm using the same guitar I've had for 10 years and decided to just sit down and practice for 2 hours this evening like the 2000 other evenings before" doesn't make good content.
Something along these lines, people who would like to improve their musical abilities sometimes procrastinate by doing music theory instead. It's safe and it's introspective. And it's authoritative---a legitimate and difficult subject---so there's the potential to feel falsely reassured that you're not wasting time. In a sense, it avoids the more difficult act of creation. This seems to be especially more likely for those who would have wanted to write music.
I.e., "drink responsibly." Perhaps music theory classes should come with a warning label, like the Mirror of Erised. You can stare into it endlessly and produce nothing.
How many Heartbleeds[1] must software users and our national security interests endure before the industry treats memory safety as a best practice for systems with exposure to the Internet?
The V8 vulnerability being exploited today, CVE-2026-85046, is listed in NVD under CWE-843, "Access of Resource Using Incompatible Type ('Type Confusion')."[2] On this class of vulnerabilities, MITRE explains:
> When a memory buffer is accessed using the wrong type, it could read or write memory out of the bounds of the buffer
Memory safety is specifically intended to prevent errors like these from becoming arbitrary out-of-bounds memory access and native code execution. Even type safety --- from the 1970s --- can prevent type confusion.
The CISA and the NSA have called for the adoption of memory-safe languages.[3] We exercise poor engineering judgment and poor ethics, as an industry, when we continue to expose users to classes of wholly avoidable security weaknesses in Internet-facing software.
If including JIT in a system renders its developer incapable of guaranteeing memory safety, then perhaps that developer’s approach to JIT is not yet mature enough to ethically distribute to non-technical consumers who are not positioned to evaluate that their security is being traded off by the developer on their behalf.
We’re past the era where security issues emanating from memory-unsafe code were tolerated due to being unavoidable — continuing to expose your software’s users to them in this present day and age is simply a choice.
You're just offering non-helpful ivory tower criticism without even understanding the problem space (which is actually one of the hardest open research problems in software engineering, cs.PL + formal methods).
But if I'm wrong, dare say, how would you write a production memory-safe JIT compiler today?
If I couldn't guarantee memory safety, I wouldn't. We're talking about an optional feature for JavaScript engines.
Security is where the rubber hits the road. It's whether customers' identities get stolen. It's whether leaders of undemocratic countries can monitor communications, locations, and social networks of people whom they oppress.
Calling this an "ivory tower" criticism is, ironically, a lack of acknowledgement of reality and that our actions have consequences to others.
Type confusion bugs exist in Rust programs too, the language does not eliminate all such issues (though it does help somewhat). I think it would be more prudent to wait until we have details before getting on the soapbox.
You probably need a programming language more powerful than Rust that can encode and check the complicated invariants needed by the JIT.
There are classes of type system—"dependently-typed"—where you can encode arbitrary predicates into the type checking. I've remember seeing examples where they could prove arbitrary facts at the assembly level, including self-modifying code. Lean is such a language, currently very popular, but there are others.
Correctness of such programs depends on some basic assumptions about the CPU/memory environment, which should work absent hardware bugs like speculative execution or side channels. Although these could probably be encoded as well, and accounted for.
Without such a general proof language, you could probably make a special language to support JIT development, although its type system would be very complicated and the language itself could be a source of bugs.
Given such languages or proofs (maybe tractable now with AI-assisted theorem proving), you can actually make insanely performant code, since you don't really need to rely on other runtime protection so much (although maybe a good idea still).
When Chromium and V8 are written in a memory-safe language then I might believe this.
Yes, if your JavaScript engine is written in C++, it’s going to be very hard to avoid very gross bugs. We have better options now.
The ability of adversaries to find and exploit very gross bugs in C++ codebases should have already compelled the industry to move to memory safety. Now that AI has democratized the ability to scour C++ codebases for really gross and exploitable bugs, I should think that our hands are at last being forced. I’m not impressed by what I’ve seen in the industry with respect to taking memory safety seriously.
I believe programmers still write in C(++) after memory safe options, in order to continue being occupied afterwards, fixing the bugs that will arise. Without criminals, police is obsolete.
> You would think that an engineering school would be wiser...
Schools are a business run by administrative staff who make purchasing decisions to solve business problems. Schools love to reduce billable teaching hours through online coursework, which invites academic dishonesty from students, and paying for honorlock is a way to achieve that reduction in expenditure, rather than paying tutors to supervise exams in person.
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