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This is a soft question. How do people usually use arxiv to put their papers? At which stage does one usually put his/her paper/report there? Someone suggests me to submit a paper while putting it on arxiv. Is that the convention that people follow?

Thank you!

Anand

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    $\begingroup$ At the first stage at which you feel not too embarassed to share the paper with your colleagues. Preferrably before submission. $\endgroup$ Aug 23, 2011 at 22:01
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    $\begingroup$ I agree that this seems like a useful question, and it is research related in the sense that it involves how one presents research to the community. So I don't see why it should be closed. If you vote to close, please leave a comment saying why. Anyway, what I normally do is post a paper on the ArXiv when it's ready to be submitted, then I wait a few days (or even a week or two) to see if I get any comments, after which I submit the paper. This allows corrections. A recent example: someone I cited in an ArXiv paper kindly wrote to point out I'd spelled his name wrong in multiple places! $\endgroup$ Aug 23, 2011 at 22:32
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    $\begingroup$ Meta thread: tea.mathoverflow.net/discussion/1121/how-to-use-arxiv $\endgroup$
    – Yemon Choi
    Aug 23, 2011 at 23:01
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    $\begingroup$ Dear Anand, People typically post a preprint on the arxiv at the same time that they post it on their own homepage, with the goal of disseminating their work to their colleagues. (These days, posting on the web is more important than journal publication for sharing your work, and the arxiv is the central repository for math on the web.) This is often at the same time that they submit to a journal, although sometimes they wait for feedback (as Joe Silverman suggests above), and sometimes they spend more time polishing their preprint before submitting it (as darij grinberg suggests). ... $\endgroup$
    – Emerton
    Aug 24, 2011 at 0:23
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    $\begingroup$ ... The conclusion seems to be that one should post on the arxiv as soon as one is ready to share one's work with colleagues, and that is often at, or close to, the same time that one is ready to submit one's paper. In particular, it is quite common to post on the arxiv at the same time as submitting, or not long prior to submitting. $\endgroup$
    – Emerton
    Aug 24, 2011 at 0:30

3 Answers 3

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My comments above formulated as an answer:

People typically post a preprint on the arxiv at the same time that they post it on their own homepage, with the goal of disseminating their work to their colleagues. (These days, posting on the web is more important than journal publication for sharing your work, and the arxiv is the central repository for math on the web.) This is often at the same time that they submit to a journal, although sometimes they wait for feedback (as Joe Silverman suggests in comments above), and sometimes they spend more time polishing their preprint before submitting it (as Darij Grinberg suggests, again in the comments above).

The conclusion seems to be that it is standard to post on the arxiv as soon as one is ready to share one's work with colleagues, and that this is often at, or close to, the same time that one is ready to submit one's paper. In particular, it is quite common to post on the arxiv at the same time as submitting, or not long prior to submitting. (But there is nothing wrong with posting on the arxiv and then spending some more time polishing your preprint before submitting it to a journal.)

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    $\begingroup$ Thank Emerton, and also thank everyone for spending your time on this not-very-relevant soft question. I am glad to know that there are also topics (tags) on career and advice. I feel like in a big family here. I wish and I am sure that one day, Mathoverflow could be as an important platform to share ideas as ArXiv in the math community. Thanks! :-) $\endgroup$
    – Anand
    Aug 24, 2011 at 8:30
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    $\begingroup$ it is standard to post on the arxiv Perhaps only a small percentage of math papers published in 2010 were/are on arxiv ... ??? $\endgroup$ Aug 24, 2011 at 14:32
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    $\begingroup$ A journal to which I recently submitted a paper (Journal of Combinatorial Theory A) and presumably other journals from that publisher allow one to "submit" simply by giving the arxiv reference. Assuming all goes well, it will be refereed, accepted, revised and then printed and sold to libraries.. Of course, it immediately springs to mind that the printing and selling could easily be cut out of the loop and just envisage a sort of "virtual journal" which would be a collection of refereed arxiv papers. $\endgroup$ Aug 25, 2011 at 9:32
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Yet another way in which people could use arXiv is as a repository for material which otherwise cannot find a home in a journal. Sometimes in the course of working on a project I wind up with some material which did not make it into the published article -- or perhaps some notes which record my growing understanding of articles already published by others -- which look like they could be useful to the community as expository or supplemental information, but which in my opinion are not otherwise significant enough to warrant submitting to a journal. I have sometimes wondered whether it would be appropriate to post such material on the arXiv. (I have not done so yet.) For that matter, I wonder whether others have done this very thing.

One drawback of this use of the arXiv is that everyone knows that most arXiv articles have not been peer-reviewed at the time of first posting, so they must be taken with a grain of salt. If an article is never published in a journal, you must read the arXiv article with a more critical eye. But as I said, I do believe that there exist some notes that are perhaps worth sharing but not worth wasting the effort to peer review.

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    $\begingroup$ I asked a similar question on putting up things that don't go to journal of the theoretical CompSci version of MO: cstheory.stackexchange.com/q/7574/1037 and the consensus seemed to be that its fine as long as its not something you plan to extend and make into a future article (to avoid redundancy and confusion). $\endgroup$ Aug 25, 2011 at 7:25
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What I personally do is as described by Emerton in his post, and so the following is what other people have told me, and not perhaps totally my own thoughts.

I have also heard that people do the following: post to the arxiv after acceptance by the journal but before giving the final proofs. Advantages:

  • You can say "Accepted by Journal X" and so you won't "lose" any citations.
  • If the referee asked for major revisions etc. you don't have the "embarrassment" of submitting a major update to the arxiv (if you care, then remember that you cannot delete anything from the arxiv, only update, so everyone, if they look hard enough, can see you mistakes, as it were. I have definitely had people say to me that this puts them off using the arxiv).
  • Your work is still made accessible to everyone, and more quickly than in journal (especially if Journal X has a long waiting time).

Disadvantages:

  • You're not getting your work out in as timely a fashion as possible-- the gap between submitting the work (i.e. when you finished the work) and the referee getting back to you can be ages (in my experience).
  • You lose the possibility to get feedback from the community.
  • You are perhaps treading a fine line when it comes to "ethics"-- you're not really posting a "preprint" any more, but basically the final version of the paper (sans any minor typos caught in the proof stage). I can see that publishers might get annoyed by this (but have no evidence that this has ever happened).
  • You lose the "public timestamp" feature of the arxiv-- hypothetically, one can imagine getting rejected a couple of times by slow referees, and so the gap between finishing the work and acceptance (and hence posting on arxiv, to make it public) being over a year, and this, again hypothetically, could lead to a priority dispute which would have been avoided if the finished work had been made pubic immediately.
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    $\begingroup$ You can add the "accepted by journal X" in a revision, so that advantage is not a real advantage. At least not enough of an advantage to compensate for the disadvantage of possibly breaking the copyright agreement one signed with the publisher (although I haven't heard of any cases when an arXiv paper was completely retracted from arXiv due to copyright problems, except for plagiarism). $\endgroup$ Aug 24, 2011 at 13:11
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    $\begingroup$ From personal experience, I can say that in reasonably active fields, it is not uncommon for the mathematics to have advanced considerably by the time the paper is printed. By the time my second paper was accepted, it already had at least two citations. It is not in print yet, and the result is already strengthened and generalised. All this is only possible if one makes the work publicly available. Being a young mathematician, I cannot expect other people to check my website regularly, so arXiv is the only way to go. It is not just a matter of time stamps, but the nice feeling of working... $\endgroup$
    – Alex B.
    Aug 24, 2011 at 14:10
  • $\begingroup$ ... together with many other people on this body of knowledge that is mathematics. Since there is the technology available to make this process smoother and faster, there doesn't seem to be a good reason not to take advantage of it. Uploading papers when they are already accepted or about to be printed seems to miss out on the best part of the arxiv. $\endgroup$
    – Alex B.
    Aug 24, 2011 at 14:11
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    $\begingroup$ @Darji and Quid: Yes, it's exactly the reason which quid gives which other people have told me is there reason for not arxiving (as you can probably guess, I agree that this is a weak argument for not arxiving...) $\endgroup$ Aug 24, 2011 at 17:13
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    $\begingroup$ @quid: What you say is true, but the editor of a good journal asks the author to update the references before publication. So even if the author was lazy and listed an ArXiv preprint in his/her submission, he/she will at least have to check MathSciNet and update the references at the page proof stage. (I know this won't always happen, but I think it is fairly typical.) $\endgroup$ Aug 25, 2011 at 17:22

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