Has anything changed about the "default" arXiv perpetual license? I am new to arXiv and when I asked several of my colleagues which license I should select for my submission, they tell me to use the one marked as default, referring to the "arXiv.org perpetual" license. However, the statement that implies that "perpetual" is default has been removed apparently. I am simply asking to find out why that is, and if anything important has changed recently.  

Here is what the first page of an arXiv submission looked like in 2012, according to this blog:


Notice the underlined statement: Select arXiv perpetual unless you know exactly what you are doing. 

Today it looks like this:


The default qualifier statement is gone! Why is that? Has anything changed?
The ArXiv default license has not changed (as can be seen in the version history on the license page, and by comparing its text using the internet archive wayback machine to jump back to 2012).



The following is my speculation on why the wording was changed: It used to be that publishing under a creative commons (CC) license (which are the alternatives on ArXiv) was basically unheard of, and so putting your paper on ArXiv under CC meant that you basically had no chance to submit it anywhere else anymore, since the copyright agreements of the publishers weren't compatible with CC.

Today, publishing under CC is still not extremely common, but at least an option in many fields (sometimes by paying an optional fee for Open Access, sometimes by default in Open Access journals). So, telling people to choose the default license was no longer as important. I assume that this is the rationale behind de-emphasizing the default license.

I would still recommend to go with the minimal license unless you know what you are doing - even if you publish it somewhere else under creative commons, it will not negatively impact you to have it on ArXiv using the default license.