Nineteen Years on arXiv, One Week Spent Asking Endorsement

In 2007 I registered on arXiv, as a PhD candidate who needed a public record for his defense. After that I mostly stepped back from managing the account myself, but colleagues kept it alive without my really trying: whenever I contributed to something, they'd add me as a co-author on current work, so my name stayed attached to research across most of the fields I've touched over the following two decades. This year I needed that standing again — for real this time. I've become an independent scientist, moving from my original field into a new one, and that puts me in almost exactly the position of a first-year PhD student walking into unfamiliar territory: I needed a formal way in, the kind of institutional backing a supervisor or senior colleague normally provides. So I went back to arXiv expecting that, of all places, this is where that kind of support would still be available to someone with my history...

Recently I finished a computer science paper I actually wanted to put there — real work, something I'd stand behind. I went to submit it to cs.ro and found out I needed an endorsement, because it isn't open submission.

Reasonable enough on its face — a filter against spam. So I started asking around: colleagues, former collaborators, people with genuinely strong publication records. Almost none of them could endorse me. It turns out arXiv's endorsement eligibility isn't about being an established researcher in general — it depends on having a sufficient number of papers in that specific category, recently. Excellent researchers who publish in journals or conference proceedings instead of arXiv, who've moved fields, who took a career break, or who just never bothered building an arXiv history in that exact category — none of them qualify to vouch for anyone, no matter how qualified they actually are to judge the work.

So I spent a week chasing endorsements that mostly couldn't happen. I'm not alone in this — I've since talked to several colleagues in the same position, established researchers from other fields or without a continuous arXiv presence, just as stuck as I was. The system doesn't just exclude independent researchers; it excludes anyone whose career path doesn't match a narrow, arXiv-shaped template — while doing nothing to actually check whether the work itself is any good.

I understand wanting a social filter against spam. What I don't understand is one that filters for community membership instead of scientific quality, wastes a week of everyone's time, and leaves no path at all for an otherwise well-qualified researcher who simply didn't "play the arXiv game" in the right category at the right time.

Endorsement codes on file

Here's the good news, though: going through this, I discovered I'm actually eligible to endorse in four categories myself — through an old paper of mine I'd half forgotten about.

Category	Field	Status
cond-mat.str-el	Strongly Correlated Electrons	Endorsement open
cond-mat.supr-con	Superconductivity	Endorsement open
cond-mat.mtrl-sci	Materials Science	Endorsement open
cond-mat.other	Condensed Matter, Other	Endorsement open