The tragedy of the commons is a well-known concept in economics: selfish action by many individuals destroy a common resource, to the detriment of all that used it. Even if each individual is aware of the destruction they have no incentive to restrain themselves, as they would just get less of the resource while the others destroy it anyway. In small communities it’s possible to solve it by appealing to ethics and reputation, but in large communities regulation is necessary.
We’re seeing it happen in scientific publishing now. Here the common resource is the attention of the scientific community, in the form of editors, referees, or readers. Everybody needs it, a paper that doesn’t get attention might as well not exist. And the destruction of the resource is being caused by the submission of too many papers, to the arXiv or to journals.
The arXiv has become unreadable. For example, today’s quant-ph has 157 submissions. Who has the time to read this? Every day? When I was young I used to start my day reading quant-ph, it had one or two dozen abstracts, I could easily skim through everything. Now? Forget it. The way I handle it is to follow authors that I know, and I suspect most people do the same. Which is of course extremely unfair to new authors that might have done something great but are not well-connected. The problem is not only reader time, but moderator time1: the poor volunteers need to go through all this in time for the announcement next morning. The situation is so dire that the arXiv has introduced yesterday a rate-limit of two papers per month per submitter. Much too generous, in my opinion, it should be two per year.
Journals are struggling with this as well. At least Quantum is, as I know it personally: it has a growing backlog of submissions that the editors haven’t even managed to look at, and after the editors manage to process it, it’s becoming ever harder to find referees as they are overloaded as well.
The cause is of course the advent of LLMs. Previously the problem was kept in check by the difficulty of writing a scientific paper. Now, though, any LLM can write something that looks like a scientific paper instantly. And way too many authors believe it is an actual scientific paper and submit it to the arXiv or to a journal. Or even if they don’t believe it, they submit it anyway because there’s no punishment for submitting bad papers, the more the merrier. I saw a particularly egregious example in yesterday’s arXiv: two almost-identical papers, by the same authors: arXiv:2609.31832 and arXiv:2609.31837. They even have slightly different versions of Figure 1, doubtless in order to not get caught by a plagiarism detector.
Such papers completely drown legitimate research. And no, it’s not easy to ignore them: it takes time to read the abstract and realise they’re worthless, it takes time to give them a desk-rejection as an editor.
Since the scientific publishing system is so decentralised, it’s very difficult to implement effective regulation. One of the few centralised institutions we have is the arXiv, so I commend them on the rate-limiting. But this still leaves the journals to fend for themselves. Rate-limiting is not effective at a journal level, because the flood of submissions is dispersed among journal, we don’t get several submissions from the same authors. One thing that might work is to give a penalty for a desk-rejection, e.g. you can’t submit another manuscript for a year if you get desk-rejected. That would give a strong incentive for authors to only submit quality work. But I don’t think that this is plausible at the moment, the punishment is way too harsh for our culture.
What is more plausible is to lower the quality of desk-rejections: instead of reading the paper and discussing it with the editorial board, an editor can simply skim the paper and make the desk-rejection individually. This will of course increase the rate of mistakes, with more high-quality research being rejected and low-quality research being sent to the referees. But what else can we do? Right now everything is just getting ignored.
This won’t solve the problem for the referees, though. On the contrary, they’ll get even more overloaded as we send them submissions as fast as we get them, and with worse curation to boot. For them the only thing that can help is raising the acceptance threshold of the journal. Or people stop using the arXiv as their notebook.
The only natural solution I see is to let AI filter and rate submissions. This is not ideal as current AI is far from perfect and it can be easily tricked (e.g. with hidden prompt injections), but other measures look artificial to me. There should be an appeal system (with reputation tracking) to counter AI reviewers’ errors.
Everyone has to evolve and to learn how to apply AI in any of their work. Or to downshift and unite with the nature. I don’t think there will be a middle ground.
If we let AI read our papers, write our papers, edit our papers, and review our papers we might as well let the machines take over scientific research and go plant potatos.
That’s probably what will happen any way. Though I’m not sure about potatos (they don’t eat them).
That was just a flippant remark, there’s nowhere to escape.
Thanks for the post, it’s important that these things are discussed (and those figures made me chuckle). I still have hope though, with the speed of workflow that LLMs can produce, we could quite easily be 10 times the daily submissions of last year’s arxiv. We’re not there yet so it means that there are still (many?) that are resisting the new sanic speed science. In my opinion, we absolutely need to reevaluate what we consider to be a unit of research. If you’re pushing out a research paper in 1-3 weeks, please spend another 2-6+ months on it, make it a much more significant body of work. [I do see the problems with this: scooping, research metrics/evaluation etc. But there are definitely solutions to these problems also.]
I think it would be enough to retain the old standards of quality. The flood we’re seeing is not from papers that adhere to them, it’s really from garbage that never counted as legitimate research.
It’s only a matter of time, though, before AI can write papers better and faster than us. Then we’d need indeed to raise the threshold of what is worth publishing, as humans won’t become capable of reading any faster.
Of course, we might just give up on reading papers, then it doesn’t matter, let the AIs churn as many papers as they want.