As of October 1, arXiv now accepts only two monthly submissions per submitter. The archive points to AI tools that facilitate the production of thin or sliced items.
The preprint archive arXiv changed its rules on October 1, 2026: each submitter can now submit only two articles per calendar month, and no more than three active submissions at the same time. The rule applies to all disciplines, not just computer science. A rejected article still counts towards the quota, but a submission withdrawn before it is announced is not counted against it. Only the person who submits is concerned: the co-authors keep their own quota.
A volume that has doubled in two years
The figures put forward by arXiv justify the measure: 40,363 submissions received in September 2026, compared to 20,569 in September 2024, and nearly 9,000 support tickets to be processed. The team believes that a limited proportion of authors submit a lot of low-quality work and take up a disproportionate fraction of the time of moderators, most of whom are volunteers.
AI tools are explicitly cited as one of the causes: they facilitate the rapid writing of articles with a very narrow scope, or of the same work divided into several publications ("sausage slicing"). The measure immediately provoked contrasting reactions in the scientific community, between relief at the bottleneck and concern for highly productive teams.
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