I always assumed it was for exactly the reasons you list. Anyone with academic credentials can submit to arxiv, but that leaves out a huge group of non-academic hobby scientists who haven't had a spare 6 years to find their way into the ivory tower.
If you're doing something as a hobbyist you think is legitimate, hitting up your local university and asking to run it by an expert should probably be step 2 and at that point you have your endorsement.
You can just email them or even hijack office hours if they don't respond.
Some slouch off the street deeply enthusiastic in their subject and trying to do work in it is basically definitionally exciting for academics, trust me. Meeting the next Srinivasa Ramanujan is a dream like winning the lotto.
Sure, but there's a huge difference between the targeted "hey I read your latest paper and I had a few questions about section 2.4" and "Dear Entire Physics Department: Einstein is Wrong! Here's my book". I honestly don't think I've ever received the former from a non-scientist (I'm not famous, so go figure) but we definitely got a lot of the later.
We also had some of the later case dropping into our seminars. For the most part people found them kind of entertaining.
> Sure, but there's a huge difference between the targeted "hey I read your latest paper and I had a few questions about section 2.4" and "Dear Entire Physics Department: Einstein is Wrong! Here's my book". I honestly don't think I've ever received the former from a non-scientist (I'm not famous, so go figure) but we definitely got a lot of the later.
Well, I know quite some people who left academia because they became victims of academic politics, or just had enormous difficulties getting their employment contracts extended, despite doing great research. I get research papers from this kind of people somewhat regularly. All of them look at least very plausible to me.
When I was still in academia, I honestly only know these "crackpot stories" from narrations (dark fairy tales); I never got any "crackpot papers", even though the particular research area is said to be prone to crackpots (perhaps the reason was that crackpots need some basic knowledge about the respective research area to realize that the colleagues of the institute actually do research in an area that is very related to their crackpot papers, so they never sent their crackpot papers to my colleagues).
of course. Unfortunately many decent people don't feel welcome. Pre-covid I used to attend many academic seminars out of sheer curiosity for the subject material. I didn't have any pet project or theories, just a quest for academic rigor in a subject. I of course had questions, but I guess that's the differentiation between crank and non-crank: the crank believes they know the answers and the non-crank isn't even confident they really know the question. I will readily accept that I'm some rare outlier ... I didn't really meet anyone like myself.
Yeah it's too bad if people don't feel welcome, attending academic seminars outside your field can be so much fun, all the more so if you ask some questions! People look at you funny when you ask e.g. "what is an M-class star?" in an astronomy lecture, but as long as you have a friend who can say "oh, he's just a physicist" they get over it.
Some slouch off the street deeply enthusiastic in their subject and trying to do work in it is basically definitionally exciting for academics, trust me.
I will say this: I've never asked for an arXiv endorsement before, but I have cold emailed professors before to inquire about certain aspects of their work. Not often mind you, but once or twice. And I've told this story here before at some point, but the response I got the first time around was overwhelmingly positive. I'm pretty sure the guy was thrilled that anybody was interested enough to read his book and send a question about it. He sent the data I was looking for, a pre-print of another related forthcoming paper from his group, and a standing invitation to reach out with additional queries in the future.
So based on that n=1 anecdote, I feel pretty good that at least some academic types would be happy to provide an arXiv endorsement to somebody doing work related to theirs. It's no guarantee of course, but my hunch is that if one is doing non-crank work, they can probably find an endorser with some effort.
People don't work in university research for the pay, it's garbage, I assure you.
I was a research associate about 15 years ago. The top tier CS researcher at that leading university payscale was something like $70k, that was the cap out.
> People don't work in university research for the pay, it's garbage, I assure you.
It's pretty good in the US. I just looked up a randomly chosen assistant professor at a public university and they make $200k. I only looked up one person's salary so this isn't cherry picked.
I'm not saying that they're in it for the money. I'm only disagreeing with the part where you said that the pay is garbage.
It's not an infinite amount of money and it's less than industry, but it seems not garbage considering job prestige, job benefits, etc.
That's legit. Nobody in my CS lab made money like that. Maybe they stopped paying terrible because when I left that lab I made double the salary at half the effort
When I was a grad student, I'd get exactly the kind of inquiries you are talking about just because my email was on the website. Professors got even more. One emeritus collected the most colorful work and stored it on a shelf in the institute's hallway and labeled it "black physics" [1].
These kind of requests have an extremely low signal to noise ratio (as in: I never heard once coming something out of this) and no one wastes their time with this. I also think it's basically impossible to contribute to my former field, theoretical physics, without a formal education. Sorry, I know it's not fair.
If you're a just a curious layman with an honest question that doesn't imply you solved the world's most difficult problems, you may get a few pointers to ressources, but I wouldn't expect a research collaboration.
You're in theoretical physics, that's quack central. The level of advanced math you need mastery over to make contributions in that field is practically unachievable for people without formal training.
I'd imagine the kind of outside inquiry that would be possible is if someone found a new computation model for some raw data that successfully passed rigorous tests and then did new feature X.
Good point, we should really differentiate the field. And at least for me it was a real fucking challenge even with formal training, I can tell you that.
If you are a non-academic hobby scientist who is actually doing interesting work, it's very easy to find someone in your specific field (even a PhD student) and ask them for an arXiv invitation.
As an actual PhD student, I will find it very dangerous to endorse someone who I don't know very much personally and judge a hobbyist work in general. The consequences might be huge for any future academic career if this turned south.
And I get emails from time to time asking about that or just people sending mass emails presenting their ideas/work. But graduate students are the bottom of pyramid who do most work but have the least authority and power.
This is not even talking about that what you actually get most of the time is a complete non-sense and you don't usually have time to focus with the good stuff if you get something.
> As an actual PhD student, I will find it very dangerous to endorse someone who I don't know very much personally and judge a hobbyist work in general.
How so? I mean, what danger is there in just endorsing somebody to submit to arXiv? It's not like you're endorsing their work as being correct or anything. An arXiv endorsement is saying nothing more than "this isn't pure bullshit / spam / pseudo-scientific nuttery".
As they say:
The endorsement process is not peer review. You should know the person that you endorse or you should see the paper that the person intends to submit. We don't expect you to read the paper in detail, or verify that the work is correct, but you should check that the paper is appropriate for the subject area. You should not endorse the author if the author is unfamiliar with the basic facts of the field, or if the work is entirely disconnected with current work in the area ...
> The consequences might be huge for any future academic career if this turned south.
How would it "turn south" though? What would that even mean in this context? If you read the paper and judged it to actually not be "pure bullshit / spam / pseudo-scientific nuttery" then unless you made one hell of an error in judgment, there shouldn't be any consequences. From what the arXiv page says, the worst thing that could possibly happen is you could lose your ability to endorse others in the future. Probably not exactly career ending? And note that your endorsement is not public information:
The fact that you have personally endorsed or not endorsed a person (as well as any optional comments) is private between you and the arXiv administrators – this information will not be shared with arXiv users or the person requesting endorsement,
There are amazing discoveries that are that are made by relatively obscure people, but having one that is both simple and correct is extremely rare. Most of the time, it takes some development. Most of the time that means you can't do it as a hobby.
If you start dropping by office hours (as someone suggested) to ask about your theories, you'll probably get a lot of polite "that sounds cool, but it doesn't work because of <cryptic reason>, maybe take a few years of classes and come back". This is a pretty powerful filter: most people will either enroll in a program (and thus cease to be a hobbyist) or give up. Those that remain are going to be pretty exceptional.
Unfortunately exceptional is equally likely to be exceptionally smart or exceptionally unhinged. The later case can easily "go south".
I don't really disagree with anything you just said, but it feels like a response to a different thread. Nobody here is arguing that randos who approach university people are generally bringing valuable stuff to the table, or arguing that uneducated laypeople are likely to successfully unify QM and GR, or solve P=NP, etc.
The topic at hand (at least as I took it, and what I was trying to address) is no more than endorsing somebody to submit to arXiv. I'm not suggesting academics should be champing at the bit to offer to collaborate with people who walk in off the street, or spend large amounts of time reading unsolicited papers in detail, etc.
An arXiv endorsement is really just saying "this is generally appropriate to be on arXiv". They're explicit in saying it's not peer-review, and doesn't even require reading the work-to-be-submitted in detail.
There are amazing discoveries that are that are made by relatively obscure people, but having one that is both simple and correct is extremely rare.
True. But let me just point out that somebody wanting to submit to arXiv doesn't necessarily have to be claiming an "amazing" discovery. In fact, a lot of papers that get put up on arXiv represent incremental progress in a very narrow area, at best. I mean, go back to the era when researchers in meta-heuristics would routinely pick "random natural phenomenon" use it as a metaphor for a new meta-heuristic, code something up, improve by 1% on some published benchmark and name their "new algorithm" something like "the gopher tunnel method" or whatever and get a paper published. Some of those papers almost certainly wound up on arXiv before being published in whatever journal or conference proceeding they eventually wound up in.
Speaking for myself, I know that if I were cold emailing somebody in academia to ask them to endorse me, it would almost certainly be for CS.LG or CS.AI and it would probably be something along those lines. An incremental improvement or minor "breakthrough" in an AI area. It wouldn't be to claim a solution to the P=NP problem or anything like that. And I'd hope that somebody would be willing to help out.
Interesting, I wasn't aware of the arXiv endorsement system [0] before this. I've only ever submitted to bioRxiv, which doesn't have any such restriction (as far as I can tell).
That said, it seems like it might be easy for someone to be endorsed if their work is scholarly.
But... You don't need academic credentials to submit to arXiv. Anyone can submit to it, and arXiv doesn't do peer review either, they just have a bare minimum amount of review to ensure you're not submitting things that clearly do not match reality.
Having an email address of a known university or institute is usually sufficient as academic credentials. If you don't have that, you need endorsement.
> But... You don't need academic credentials to submit to arXiv.
Well... sure, that's true in the strictest possible sense. But in practice, arXiv does do a measure of gatekeeping that's heavily based around academic affiliation as a criterion. It's just that it's possible with some effort to work around that and submit as someone who is outside of formal academia. Or at least they say it is[1]. I've never tried the process myself and I've heard mixed stories from others who have, about how (easy|hard) it is to get endorsed in such a case.
arXiv requires that users be endorsed before submitting their first paper to
a category.
<snip>
arXiv may give some people automatic endorsements based on subject area,
topic, previous submissions, and academic affiliation. In most cases,
automatic endorsement is given to authors from known academic institutions
and research facilities. arXiv submitters are therefore encouraged to
associate an institutional email address, if they have one, with their arXiv
account (see author registration help). This will expedite the endorsement
process.
<snip>
If you need to be endorsed by someone, it is best for you to find an
endorser who
you know personally and
is knowledgeable in the subject area of your paper.
A good choice for graduate students would be your thesis advisor or another
professor in your department/institution working in your field.
So yeah, you can see that their whole setup is really heavily oriented towards members of formal academia.
That said, they do explicitly acknowledge the need to occasionally reach out and solicit endorsements from people you don't know. So I assume this does happen.
Alternatively this is the recommended way to proceed.
Start by finding related articles in your field. Your preprint surely has
cited works that are already posted in the arXiv, some of these works will
be particularly relevant.
Bring up these abstracts from the arXiv page.
You can find somebody qualified to endorse by clicking on the link titled
"Which of these authors are endorsers?" at the bottom of every abstract
page.
Using that information, you can then find the email address of the submitter
on the abstract page just under the "Submission history" heading.
But, again, I've heard mixed stories from people who have tried. I can't help but think there ought to be some mechanism that's a little more deterministic, but while keeping the overall spirit of arXiv in place, and keeping cranks out. But I'll admit I don't know exactly what form that would take off the top of my head.
