The arXiv isn't peer-reviewed as such, but it does have moderators; the FAQ says that
[n]o plausible submission will be rejected outright, but that they do reserve the right to reclassify or reject obviously unsuitable things.
In a recent thread on sci.math, one of the contributors gave a short list of people who had been rejected from the arXiv: a paper on cold fusion, a paper on theoretical physics, and a paper on supposed flaws in the Big Bang theory. I also found another example of a rejection; a reply to someone else's article about the anthropic principle (again in physics).
It appears that one cause of rejected authors' unhappiness is the requirement for endorsement; some new authors are required to find a sponsor at an academic institution, or someone who has posted previously. There has for a while been a policy that people emailing from some domains (.com, .net and so on) had to find endorsers also, whereas those from most .edu or other academic domains did not.
Even with some (very limited) moderation, there are still some ... interesting papers in the arXiv. This author claims to have proved the Riemann Hypothesis, Goldbach's conjecture, that Euler's constant is irrational and the Hecke conjecture. |
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