A petition to arXiv Leadership and Scientific Advisory Board — open for signatures

Give Authors Control: Let Us Decide If AI Bots Can Read Our arXiv Papers

We call on arXiv to implement a simple permission toggle allowing authors to decide what automated scrapers can access.

– verified signatories

For decades, arXiv has been the cornerstone of open scientific communication. But today, open access for humans has become a free pass for commercial AI models to harvest our research for training data without consent or attribution.

Currently, authors posting to arXiv have no control over whether bots scrape their full-text PDFs and LaTeX source files.

We are calling on arXiv to implement a simple permission toggle during submission, allowing authors to decide what automated scrapers can access:

Full Access: Bots can read and scrape the full text and source files.

Metadata Only: Bots are restricted to the Title, Abstract, and Citation metadata.

Open science for human readers should not mean mandatory, unconsented data harvesting by commercial entities. Advancing scientific knowledge demands immense time, resources, and intellectual rigor — we deserve a say in whether our original work is fed into massive, opaque training sets.

We invite all researchers with an active arXiv account to add their name below in support of this petition.

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