TITLE: New arXiv procedures?
QUESTION [99 upvotes]: Recently I encountered a new phenomenon when I tried to submit a paper to arXiv. The paper was an erratum to another, already published, paper and will be published separately. I got a message from arXiv saying that I need to join the erratum with the original file. I was a little surprised receiving a reply from, obviously, a human being. Although I thought the request was a bit silly, I did what was requested, submitted the joint paper (the original union the errata), and forgot about it. But today I got a call from another mathematician. She tried to submit a paper with a title  "... II". The paper "... I" was already in the arXiv and submitted to a (very good) journal. Both papers solve similar but different problems. One of these problems is at least 40 years old. Her submission was denied:  she got a request from the arXiv to submit a union of that new paper and the old paper instead. This is quite silly. Is there now a special person in the arXiv who is making these decisions? It looks like there has been a change in how arXiv is managed. I understand that this is not a research question, and I make it a community Wiki. I post it here because several frequent MO users are affiliated with arXiv.

REPLY [51 votes]: I talked to the arXiv staff about Olga Kharlampovich's submissions and I now have some answers.  The letter that Olga posted here is a form letter that doesn't fit the facts.  The text overlap tool reported that the new submission substantially overlapped with the old submission.  After that, as far as I know, no moderator and no advisory committee was ever contacted.  Instead, an arXiv employee sent this stock response just to keep things moving.  After that, I was told, her case was added to the to-do list.  I was assured that as of last week, before this question was posted to MathOverflow, her submission was already slated to be reverted in her favor on Monday.
Obviously this is not satisfactory.  I am one of the moderators (and not the only one) who should have seen the appeal.   The e-mail said that someone like me had seen it and rejected her appeal, but apparently no such thing happened.  It seems that the submitted version (which I think is now version 3) had something like 75% text overlap with the previous version (version 2) of arXiv:1111.0577.  It's not so unreasonable to flag such a submission.  After that it wasn't handled properly.  I do not want to name names and lead people to pour opprobrium on the overworked arXiv staff.  (There are only two of them who handle daily submissions.)  But I want to make this story sound accountable, so I can say that some of my information came directly from Paul Ginsparg.
To go back to the title question, no there has not been any great change in arXiv management.  You could certainly argue that there is insufficient management, but that's not the same thing.
People are also asking about the policy by which papers are labelled as having text overlap with other papers.  A clearer statement of that policy would be useful, but that is a separate question from Olga's case.

According to e-mail that I just saw, this morning Olga was given the option of reverting the previous arXiv paper to Part I and submitting Part II separately.  Her answer, according to what I saw, was that she elected to keep it as a replacement after all.  I am mentioning this so that readers who see arXiv postings this week won't think that injustice continues.
I stand by my explanation that the stock e-mail that she was sent didn't fit the facts, and that her appeal should not have been stonewalled.  (In fact her appeal was soon seriously considered internally, but that was not explained.)  However, in the original posting, Olga's name was withheld supposedly to protect her interests.  Although I understand that anonymity is sometimes vital even in a public accusation, in this case I don't see how it helped matters.