Aug 26, 2025 - The challenge of AI slop for preprint servers

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In the last few months, the problems associated with the explanded use of GPTs and LLMs via services such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and others have come to preprint servers in mass. At Engineering Archive, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in preprints submitted, growing from an average of 60 submissions per month to closer to 200. This increase is submissions has massively increase the moderation workload as it can be difficult to filter the real human-authored work, from the slop. Often these submissions are made by so-called “independent researchers” with no institutional affiliation. They may or may not be real people. In the past, submission spam was often used as a form of citation gaming, attempts to artificially exploit Google Scholar indexing to make ones academic profile look more prestigious than is deserved. However, more recently, this is no longer the case.

As reported in Nature, this wave of AI slop is not limited to engrXiv and is hitting other preprint servers in the same way, overwhelming our volunteer moderators. Unfortunately, this wave of AI slop has real costs associated with it in terms of volunteer burnout and the costs associated with hosting this content and issuing DOIs when it slips through moderation.

At Engineering Archive, we are going to attempt to further crack down on these types of submissions. Submissions that appear as though they may be largely AI generated are going to face further scrutiny. This will slow down the timeline from submission to public posting and unfortunately, some legitimate work will be caught up as well. “Independent researchers” may also be asked to further verify their identity. We are relunctant to restrict the publication of work from authors who currently lack institutional affiliation because we don’t believe that good engineering research can only be performed within academic facilities, but something must be done mitigate the negative impacts of LLM generated content.

Dec 31, 2024 - End of 2024

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This year has been a year of growth at Engineering Archive. We have seen a return to the annual submission numbers that we saw prior to the transition to the new hosting platform and greater than a 20% increase over last year! Some of the issues we saw last year with excessive spam submissions have been mitigated with the implementation of new software to catch automated submissions. Of course, that doesn’t stop those who make such submissions manually, but this is where our manual screening process comes in.

engrXiv cummulative preprint count, a bar graph with blue bars showing around 640 preprint submissions for 2024

We continue to appreciate the support of the Engineering Archive Membership Circle. The Membership Circle creates the opportunity for institutions, libraries, and other organizations to support the sustainability of the server through a $500 annual contribution. Many of our supporting libraries are in their 7th year of keeping the server running!

We hope you’ll keep in touch via social media. Find us on the fediverse at our Mastodon account @engrxiv@scicomm.xyz. Note that we are winding down our usage of Twitter and will shortly stop using that platform altogether.

Thank you and HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Oct 30, 2024 - Winding down usage of Twitter

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Since the early days (mid-2016) of Engineering Archive, we have had a presence on Twitter. It was basically the go-to platform for scientific communication and academic discourse. It was actually through Twitter that the initial introductions were made which allowed engrXiv to exist! However, the social media landscape has changed and Twitter today is a shell of what it once was. While good communities may still be found there, the platform itself is a representation of the worst that the online world has to offer.

As a result, Engineering Archive will be sunsetting our presence on Twitter over the coming months. The @engrXiv account at Twitter has been in passive-only mode for the past couple of years, posting only announcements of new preprints through the IFTTT service. However, we have made the decision to cease posting to that platform all-together at the conclusion of our current IFTTT subscription period in May 2025. After that time, the Twitter account for the server will be effectively archived and no long actively announcing new preprints.

Instead, we encourage you to find us on the Fediverse via our Mastodon account, @engrxiv@scicomm.xyz, where we will continue to announce new preprints and other activities relevant to the server. We have decided for now to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and will not be creating accounts on either Bluesky or Threads. We hope instead that you will join us on the fediverse where you can find our account through Mastodon, Friendica, Lemmy, or any of the other plethora of compatible services. Of course, you can always go old-school and subscribe to our RSS feed! This same RSS feed can be accessed using the Matrix messaging protocol at #engrXiv-new-preprints:matrix.org.