u/nilofering

Hi,

this is a request to keep posting every day, atleast 2 posts per day and keep helping each other.

I will have to close the community if this does not happen in the next 1 month.

We have to believe we can achieve the goals.

I'm choosing random people who contribute the most to this community to be mentored by an IPS officer for 3 months. Already gave free resources to the most commenting person.

If you've ever tried to submit to arXiv without an institutional affiliation, you know the pain. You need an endorsement from someone already active in your target category. But if you don't have a university network, you're basically cold-emailing strangers and hoping for the best. Most people never hear back. I personally get a lot of dm's.

I built a free page where independent researchers can submit their paper details and request an endorsement: trybibby.com/request-arxiv-endorsements

It covers CS, math, and stats categories (cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.CL, stat.ML, etc). But can cover any categories based on mentors.

But here's where I need the community's help.

The request side is live. Now I need researchers who are willing to review these requests and endorse people with legitimate work. Think of it like a marketplace — researchers post requests, mentors browse and decide who to endorse. No obligation, no pressure. You just see the paper title, abstract, and category, and decide if the work is worth endorsing. I will be emailing any new requests that come through.

If you're an established researcher and want to help, sign up here: trybibby.com/become-arxiv-mentor

It takes 2 minutes. You'll be able to see incoming requests in your field and choose who to endorse on your own time. Also helps to find collaborators?

I was also thinking of a collaborative google sheet ? what do you think is the best?

Has anyone here endorsed someone before? What made you say yes or no?

PS:- After carefullly reviewing feedback, I'm holding this for now, I won't be connecting any mentors to any one who needs arxiv endorsements.

I'm also thinking of a process where atleast 5-6 people with research expertise review the papers and give feedback... and also recommend mentees to first submit to a journal (Which is expensive unless paid by the university). I will keep things updated. Thank you for the constructive criticism.

Not a rant. Just results.

We use a lot of tools. I got paranoid after reading about a research team whose pre-publication methodology showed up in a competitor's paper with suspiciously similar framing. Decided to actually read the ToS of everything we use.

ChatGPT (free/Plus): Trains on your inputs by default. Opt-out exists but it's not the default and not everyone on the team had done it.

Overleaf: Owned by Digital Science (Holtzbrinck). Broad license to content "for the purpose of providing the service." That language is intentionally wide. Your pre-publication documents are on their servers.

Bibby AI: No training on user data. Verified in their privacy policy. Specifically built for research use cases.

Underleaf: Document stays yours. No parent publishing company with commercial interest in research output.

OCTREE: Same philosophy. Built for research teams that need to not think about this stuff.

We switched the whole lab to Bibby AI + Zotero 6 weeks ago. Zero complaints from the team, slightly better workflow actually. Even tools like Render, Elicit, SciSpace, PaperPal share your data.

I'm not saying your ideas are definitely being stolen. I'm saying you should know where they live.

Happy to share more about the audit process if anyone wants to do the same for their lab.