| I have zero compassion for ArXiv. Allow me to share a horror story: I was the victim of a pretty bizarre super in-your-face academic theft. Someone snooped a half-finished paper draft of mine off GitHub and...actually got it published in ArXiv and a "real" journal: https://forbetterscience.com/2023/10/30/stephensons-alternat... In spite of having a full commit log (with GitHub verified commits!!!) of both the code AND the paper, both ArXiv and the journal didn't seem to care or bother at all. I went all the way to contacting Stanford, the institution that the thief falsely pretended to be affiliated with, to get them to help me with this. Stanford contacted ArXiv, and ArXiv then:
1. Removed the thief's upload: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.14810
2. Allowed the thief to copyright strike MY (!!!!) own research: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04214 How does this make any sense? You remove somebody's stolen content, and then allow the thief to copyright strike it? what the fuck... |
For your question, fraudulent copyright infringement claims are plaguing most services hosting content (GitHub, YouTube, etc). Haven't seen it again on ArXiv so chances are it's a rare occurrence. So the admins probably weren't sure what to do. At least in the comments, they make it clear, it wasn't due to policy (as mentioned in the stolen paper) that yours was removed but essentially due to being forced by the claims.
What surprised me was that a journal in MDPI garbage land, published an expression of concern.