For anybody outside the SV, and especially outside the US, this seems high, yes.

arXiv does not need to and should not optimize for “shareholder value”, which is at least nominally the justification for outlandish CEO pay packages.

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kingstnap 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

arXiv doesn't need much. All they do is host static pdfs uploaded by someone else with free CDN services from Fastly [0]. I'm sure they could get academics to volunteer moderation services as well.

In reality you could host the entire thing for well under $50k/year in hardware and storage if someone else is providing a free CDN. Their costs could be incredibly low.

But just like Wikipedia I see them very likely very quickly becoming a money hole that pretends to barely be kept afloat from donations. All when in reality whats actually happening is that its a ridiculous number of rent seekers managed to ride the coattails of being the defacto preprint server for AI papers to land themselves cushy Jobs at a place that spends 90+% of their money on flights and hotels and wages for their staff.

I'm already expecting their financial reports to look ridiculously headcount heavy with Personnel Expenses, Meetings and Travel blowing up. As well as the classic Wikipedia style we spend a ton of money in unclear costs [1].

Whats already sad is they stopped having a real broken down report that used to actually showed things. Like look at this beautiful screenshot of a excel sheet. Imagine if Wikipedia produced anything this clear. [2]

[0] https://blog.arxiv.org/2023/12/18/faster-arxiv-with-fastly/

[1] https://info.arxiv.org/about/reports/FY26_Budget_Public.pdf

[2] https://info.arxiv.org/about/reports/2020_arXiv_Budget.pdf

	▲	OneDeuxTriSeiGo 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> arXiv doesn't need much. All they do is host static pdfs uploaded by someone else with free CDN services from Fastly [0]. I'm sure they could get academics to volunteer moderation services as well. This just isn't true. arXiv nowadays has to deal with major moderation demands due to the influx of absolute drivel, spam, and slop that non-academics and less-than-quality academics have been uploading to the site. Moderation for arXiv isn't perfect or comprehensive but they put so much work into trying to keep the worst of the content off their site. At this point while they aren't doing full blown peer review, they are putting a lot of work into providing first pass moderation that ensures the content in their academic categories is of at least some level of respectable academic quality.

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jjk166 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

$300k for a top executive position isn't especially high for anywhere in the US. That's around what the administrative director of a hospital would be making, which seems like a much smaller scope than leading ArXiv. For comparison, my roommate works for a non-profit that serves Philadelphia whose CEO's salary is $1.1 million. The CEO of the wikimedia foundation, which is similar in terms of role, has a salary of $450k. General average for US CEOs including for profits is around $800k and for large organizations tens of millions is not atypical.

Non-profits aren't maximizing stock value, but they do need to optimize for stakeholder value - you want to maximize the amount of money being donated in and you want to make the most of the donations you receive, both to advance the primary mission of the non-profit and to instill confidence in donors. This demands competent leadership. The idea that just because something is not being done for profit means the value of the person's contributions is worth less is absurd. So long as the CEO provides more than $300k of value by leading the organization, which might include access to their personal connections, then the salary is sensible.