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by swiftcoder 87 days ago
The "essentially static hosting" isn't the cost centre (although with 5 million MAU, it's nothing to sneeze at). The real costs are on the input side - they have an ingestion pipeline that ensures standardised paper formatting and so on, plus at least some degree of human review.
2 comments
bonoboTP 87 days ago
Do you mean that the CPU compute cost of turning latex into pdf/HTML is the main cost?
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swiftcoder 87 days ago
No, I mean that the pipeline requires software engineers to build/maintain, and salaries are (as in basically every tech organisation) the dominant cost
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bonoboTP 87 days ago
Then drop it and make people upload a pdf and a zip of the latex sources.

Most people I talk to hate that pipeline and spend a lot of debug hours on it when Arxiv can't compile what overleaf and your local latex install can.

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domoritz 87 days ago
Arxiv can recompile latex to support accessibility and html. Going to pdf submissions would be a major step backward.
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bonoboTP 87 days ago
Make it an external service then, and leave the thing that's already working great to just be.

The reason authors like and use arxiv is that it gives 1) a timestamp, 2) a standardized citable ID, and 3) stable hosting of the pdf. And readers like the no-nonsense single click download of the pdf and a barebones consistent website look.

All else is a side show.

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OneDeuxTriSeiGo 87 days ago
You have to keep in mind that an increasing portion of their time and labor is going towards moderation and filtering due to a mass influx of nonsensical AI generated papers, non-academic numerology-tier hackery, and other useless drivel.

Spinning the service off forces other the labor out onto other universities rather than leaving them to solely Cornell

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lou1306 87 days ago
The PDF formatting is all but standardised. They ingest LaTeX sources, which is formatted according to the authors' whims (most likely, according to whatever journal or conference they just submitted the manuscript to). I'll concede that the (relatively novel) HTML formatter gives paper a more uniform appearance. They also integrate a bunch of external services for e.g., citation metrics and cross-references. Still hard to justify such a high cost to operate, but eh.

Also, the "human review" is a simple moderation process [1]. It usually does not dig into the submission's scientific merits.

[1] https://info.arxiv.org/help/moderation/index.html

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