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by treesprite82 1777 days ago
> They don't filter work in need of revision. This is literally described on the arXiv website: https://arxiv.org/help/moderation "What policies guide moderation before public announcement? "

The page you're linking backs up what I've listed. The third subheader in that section for example:

> A submission may be declined if the moderators determine it lacks originality, novelty, or significance.

> Submissions that do not contain original or substantive research, including undergraduate research, course projects, and research proposals, news, or information about political causes (even those with potential special interest to the academic community) may be declined.

> Papers that contain inflammatory or fictitious content, papers that use highly dramatic and misrepresentative titles/abstracts/introductions, or papers in need of significant review and revision may be declined.

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> it leads to people trusting arXiv when they should not

I'm only claiming that their moderation is a quick once-over to filter out papers blatantly in violation of those policies (like the "total obvious nutjobs" you describe), while being clear that it's not a peer review.

1 comments

“May” is the key word in that long sentence. bioRxiv certainly does not review content of submissions using the standard definition of the word “review”. They may scan for style and general content type—for example rejecting reviews.

But I agree with the parent comment that these archives are extremely valuable.

I disagree that informal community comments are of much critical value. In most cases twitter comments and micro-reviews are relatively trivial and are usually based on quick reads rather than deep perusals.