- Edited
I would like to say clearly that I am not against arXiv. Mine is a harsh criticism but aimed at its improvement.
I use it on a daily basis and could not work without it. For example, I now urgently need to read the paper "N.D. Birrell and L.H. Ford (Phys. Rev. D 22, 330 (1980))" (suggested by a referee for new comments in forthcoming papers) but my institution is not registered and it is a big problem for me (if anyone could send it to me by mail I would be immensely grateful)
The fact that arXiv is free just doesn't mean it doesn't cost anything. “If you're not paying for the product, you are the product”. This line was originally said by Mr. Steve Jobs (Founder of Apple Inc).
As an indirect consequence of arXiv policies academic journals have started to apply the "open choice" (if you don't see the link read my essay): "This copyright attribution
conflict has generated a silent war between arXiv and the academic publishing companies
from which the latter have evidently emerged defeated. Scientific journals have devised a
form of “open access” publishing in an attempt to compete with arXiv by making journal
papers freely accessible to everyone directly from the journal's website. However, authors
must pay thousands of dollars per article to obtain this option as compensation for lost
revenue and in support of the publication expenses. Evidently all this causes a serious issue of
free access to research as there are few researchers or institutions which have the economic
means to face such an expense for each article published"
More and more journals are becoming purely "open access", and more journals will migrate to this choice in the future , until only the most prestigious ones will resist, the ones that mainly accept publications from the established researchers which can guarantee a large number of citations at very low risk.
Even though arXiv is free, it will end up with the authors themselves paying for peer-review and publication costs, on the order of thousands of dollars per paper. After thirty years of experimenting with arXiv and similar repositories, is it really worth it?
This is a huge problem for the future of science and I don't see a straightforward solution.
In any case, everything would be more acceptable if arXiv would provide the reasons for their decisions giving the authors the right of defense, at least in the most controversial cases and in cases in which the papers havepassed serious peer reviews. At least in this arXiv should respect academic journals, since it is also thanks to their work that they can exist and thanks to their (often tacit) concession on copyright that they can continue to give free access to papers.