The reason is because arxiv is growing significantly leading to 297,000 deficit in operating costs for 2025 alone. Corenell has helped with donation a long with other organizations that pay membership fees.
As a result, donors + leaders of arxiv think it's best to spin off to increase funding.
Also, the "human review" is a simple moderation process [1]. It usually does not dig into the submission's scientific merits.
A critical component of the arXiv-CE project is moving our services entirely off of Cornell University’s infrastructure — this goal is also known as Milestone 1. Milestone 1 completion is projected for the end of fiscal year 2026.
Assume if you are a library, and every day, half baked so-called books brought to the librarians where they have to make sure it is meaningful, readable and printable, 3000 of them, they accept and put them in the right bookshelf, and entire internet reads every one of them on the shelf multiple times by the AI bots, search engines and researchers.
They are not only making a new library, they are also maintaining both and syncing two libraries because Cornell cannot handle the volume of access by bots.
It is not static. It is essentially running two ships side-by-side, and two ships need to appear as one from the outside. And, the new ship is still only half built. The new ship is being designed, and being built. 27 seems small to me.
I've contracted into some consultancy teams which you could uncharitably describe as "15 people and $4mn/yr to create one PDF per month".
Dollars? So 300 people's cable bill? That's basically nothing. They're spending too much, and it's still nothing, and the solution is going to be to privatize it and eventually loot it.
You can't hand out a collection plate and get $300K for Arxiv? Your local neighborhood church can. Civilization is obviously collapsing.
