Checklist for arXiv submission

My checklist that I use before submitting a manuscript to arXiv. Note: only tested on MacOS.

On local machine

  • Make a copy of the document folder
  • Check todo list
  • Check figure placement (some figures may manually need to be moved by changing htpb)
  • Check all acknowledgements (funding agencies, people that contributed, HPC, etc.)
  • Spell / language check (consistent US / UK spelling, consistent choice of hyphenation, consistent captions)
  • Run arxiv_latex_cleaner arxiv_draft --commands_only_to_delete author1Edit author2Edit --comands_to_delete commentCommand1 commentCommand2 (this creates a new folder)
    • commands_only_to_delete is useful for deleting commands surrounding text which should still remain in the manuscript (for instance seeing who made which changes)
    • Be careful as deleting comments can sometimes change the compile, since they are replaced with a newline
  • Run arxiv_flatten_submission --asset_directory=figures/ from inside the newly created directory (see GitHub - davidstutz/arxiv-submission-sanitizer-flattener)
  • Delete figures directory (since figures are now in the main directory)
  • Copy to new directory and compile with pdflatex three times
  • Compare the pre-comment removal etc. pdf to the new pdf with, for instance, Compare PDF files
    • Should be identical. Sometimes spacing errors occur because of the deletions.
  • Check no errors in latex output
  • Check no comments

Start upload to arXiv process

  • Consult the arXiv submission schedule to decide when to post
  • Choose “arXiv.org perpetual, non-exclusive license” license (for most use cases)
  • Upload the comment-deleted version to arxiv (in a zip is easiest)
  • Compare the arxiv version to the original with the pdf comparer
  • Copy abstract / title / authors to the metadata of arxiv.
    • Note that some latex might have to be made more simple to be compatible with the arxiv system (look at the preview). Also, arxiv has a character limit for the abstract of 1920 characters.
  • Send paper key to coauthors when the paper goes up on the arxiv