Peer Review
Although the arXiv is not peer reviewed, a collection of moderators for each area review the submissions and may recategorize any that are deemed off-topic. The lists of moderators for many sections of the arXiv are publicly available but moderators for most of the physics sections remain unlisted.
Additionally, an "endorsement" system was introduced in January 2004 as part of an effort to ensure content that is relevant and of interest to current research in the specified disciplines. The new system has attracted its own share of criticism for allegedly restricting inquiry. Under the system, an author must first get endorsed. Endorsement comes from either another arXiv author who is an endorser or is automatic, depending on various evolving criteria, which are not publicly spelled out. Endorsers are not asked to review the paper for errors, but to check if the paper is appropriate for the intended subject area. New authors from recognized academic institutions generally receive automatic endorsement, which in practice means that they do not need to deal with the endorsement system at all.
A majority of the e-prints are also submitted to journals for publication, but some work, including some very influential papers, remain purely as e-prints and are never published in a peer-reviewed journal. A well-known example of the latter is an outline of a proof of Thurston's geometrization conjecture, including the Poincaré conjecture as a particular case, uploaded by Grigori Perelman in November 2002. Perelman appears content to forgo the traditional peer-reviewed journal process, stating "If anybody is interested in my way of solving the problem, it's all there – let them go and read about it."
While the arXiv does contain some dubious e-prints, such as those claiming to refute famous theorems or proving famous conjectures such as Fermat's last theorem using only high-school mathematics, they are "surprisingly rare". The arXiv generally re-classifies these works, e.g. in "General mathematics", rather than deleting them.
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