A few thoughts on #arXivgate
Both sides are wrong, but arXiv is wronger!
Background: arXiv announced a new policy by which anyone caught submitting AI slop would be banned for a year and then would only be able to submit after peer review. This has led a lot of backlash and backlash-to-the-backlash.
A few thoughts:
Different fields have very different practices & standards. For example, in some fields, papers may represent less than a year of person-work and have 2-3 authors who are all intimately aware of its content. In others, a paper can represent 10+ years of person-work, and have 20-30 authors several of whom were not even active at the same time. Working scientists can be quite field parochial and lack an almost complete awareness of differing standards, even in adjacent fields. I am perhaps especially aware of these because I have lived both under computer science and life science cultures1.
In Big Life Sciences, it is common to have papers where some authors are not even in principle able to judge everything that is in a paper. This is the point of collaborating: it’s not just about sharing workload, but sharing expertise.2
Due process is good. I am not against penalties for bad science. I have written before that scientific fraud should sometimes lead to actual jail time and I stand by that.
However, I will also stand on the principle that punishing all authors for something that they may not control is bad. This is true even if the action being penalised is also bad. A junior author whose contribution gets flagged will not be able to ever again be a normal co-author on an arXiv preprint for the rest of their career? Responsibility needs to flow to those who have the power to change things.3
ArXiv did a terrible job of communication. The announcement uses the modern passive aggressive style of “just clarifying our code of conduct, here, folks” to introduce a sweeping change. Making people go through peer review before posting on arXiv contradicts the whole concept of the preprint! They also go back and forth between claiming this is a general principle and that it only applies to the most egregious cases.
The anti-arXiv side also did a terrible job of communication. The biggest objection (to me and I think to all sides) is to holding all the co-authors equally responsible. However, then it does seem that we’re soft on AI-slop and not willing to take responsibility for anything.
Altogether, the whole discussion has been folks talking past each other and neither side has made its points very clear. At the end of the day, though, arXiv is an institution which needs be held to higher standards than a bunch of Twitter posters.
I have faced both critiques that I do not publish a lot (which I don’t) and, early in my transition to life sciences, that I do not publish in high-enough profile venues (not a critique I hear a lot nowadays, but I did at some point).
I hand wrote this “not x, but y” and then on re-reading noticed that it read AI-written. I assure you it’s not.
Also, in the life sciences, the corresponding author gets more credit/benefits. In my personal CV, I separate first/last author papers from the rest in recognition of this fact. I expect to benefit more from those authorships than from middle-authorships.