arXiv is not just for crackpot physics. A lot of the papers on arXiv are there to allow wide access to science research that would otherwise not be possible with the prohibitive cost of journal subscriptions. I know several fantastic physicists and major international collaborations that publish on arXiv 6 months before the paper is published in a journal.

It's true that you need to be an expert in the field to tell the crackpots from the experts, but if you don't understand enough of the paper to tell whether it is realistic or not then you probably will not gain very much from reading it.

Oh, I stand corrected then.

I discovered ArXiv over a decade ago, but from early on, it was filled with people of questionable insight, if not sanity, and I began to avoid it. There are some notorious USENET trolls who used it to build their credibility, and it kept me away since.

It's got no data quality checks, so you need to use it with caution, but something like http://arxiv.org/list/hep-ex/recent is a really nice tool for High Energy Physics (you can see quite a few of the first results from the LHC there, for example, without paying any journal subs.)

But it's a much better academic tool than a commercial one, and I would not be surprised that a lot of cranks put stuff up there and claim respectability by association, especially in theory or mathematics.

Actually, getting your paper into arXiv isn't that easy - IIRC, it essentially requires you to work at a university.

I think that you must register as being present at an institution, but I am not sure how strongly they check that information. Maybe they take your subs off if you are caught lying, but what are the chances of being caught?

??? "ArXiv is mostly for crackpot physics" ???

The entire string theory community publishes all their papers on hep-th before sending sending them to journals (which nobody reads as everything is on ArXiv). Of course, maybe you will argue that string theory is crackpot physics...

Any idea how it is for CS papers?