Yes, the daly time recently is absolutely ridiculous. Been waiting on a preprint that's already been accepted in a top journal for seemingly no reason.
I'd like to see a cumulative version of that power law plot. How many papers had a delay of at least X days.
I have been bit by several inexplicable, long delays recently. In my case, I suspected the reason was choosing stat.ml as primary and cs.lg as cross-list, which, after my time in purgatory, was flipped (without asking me, of course). My choice was completely defensible.
“And here we found the culprit. The paper I was submitting belongs under cs.CY, Computers and Society, as I now know after reviewing all the categories more carefully.” I’d think the indirect cause is ai, given its recent bull/glass shop approach.
Within the cs.CY category, I only found a slight increase in delays since 2016, that seems to be well within error bars, but it could also be that my sample size was too small.
The growths of scientific papers published has been understood to be exponential since the early 50s.[0] So it really shouldn't be a surprise. Even without AI.
Ditto with this, if arxiv is just a hosting site then what’s different then a personal GitHub site hosting your paper? Ai and Google would pick it up eventually.
That means that 10 years from now I don’t want think about making sure the hosting server is up.
I also want it to have a standard format for bibliography, DOI, and authors.
I agree it isn’t much, but it’s more than I get from a regular web hosting service and it is a standard format for papers so I don’t think it makes sense for every author to roll their own.