ArXiv, the pioneering preprint server, declares independence from Cornell | Science | AAAS

"The move will help arXiv raise more money from a broader range of donors to fund the staffing and technology needed to support the site’s skyrocketing number of preprints—expected to top 300,000 this year—says Greg Morrisett, dean and vice provost of Cornell Tech, the graduate-education and research arm of the university that manages arXiv. The money will also help deal with other challenges, Morrisett says, such as the emergence of “AI slop,” mediocre or fraudulent submissions written entirely by artificial intelligence....

That growth has resulted in operating deficits in the past 2 years, including a $297,000 deficit in 2025. Cornell helped cover that overrun and also provided $819,000 in in-kind support, helping finance arXiv’s total annual operating costs of $6.7 million. Besides Cornell, arXiv is funded by more than 270 organizations, including academic library consortia and many of the world’s top research institutions, which pay as much as $10,000 per year in membership fees....

ArXiv competes with other funding needs within Cornell Tech, Morrisett says. “When we talked to certain organizations [about the preprint server], there was a sense of concern that Cornell exerted too much influence,” he says. “They would be a little worried about sending a check to Cornell University and hoping that it made its way into the arXiv coffers.”...

In going independent, arXiv joins two other leading preprint servers whose creation it helped inspire: bioRxiv, which serves biological sciences, and medRxiv, which hosts preprints about medicine. Last year, they migrated from their original academic parent, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, to a new nonprofit, openRxiv, for similar reasons."