I put a paper on arXiv and now I want to send it to a double-blind journal. What can I do? Several months ago, I wrote a working paper and put it on arXiv. Now, the paper has improved considerably, and I would like to submit it to the American Mathematical Monthly. Their author instructions clearly say &quot;please refrain from putting your paper online until you have heard from the editor&quot; (this is probably meant to keep the review process double-blind). I see in arXiv that I can withdraw the paper, but its title and my name will remain there, so it will still not be anonymous.
Is there a way to temporarily hide a paper from arXiv, until the review process is done?
EDIT: I asked the editors about it, and they reply was, essentially: it is preferred to not put the paper online before submission, but it does not disqualify it. However, the fact that the paper is online should be noted in the cover letter, and preferrably, the submitted paper should be given a different title so that it is not too easy to find it by Google.
This may seem like a digression at first, but wait for it:
The main purpose of double-blind peer review should not be to prevent the reviewers learning the authors’ identity by all means.
This can be a welcome side effect, but often this is impractical not only due to preprints but also due to previous work, conferences, idiosyncrasies, etc.
If a malignant reviewer wants to break the double blindness, they often can.
Fortunately, many peer reviewers don’t want to do this:
They are completely fine with performing an unbiased review of a paper that is only based on its own merits – as they ideally should.
However, no matter how good our intentions, we are still prone to subconscious or at least implicit biases.
The main goal of double-blind peer review should be to help reviewers to eliminate (or at least reduce) those involuntary biases¹.
By contrast, with single-blind peer review, it is impossible for reviewers to be unbiased, as the names of the authors (and their affiliation) are inescapable.
In light of this, I suggest to submit your (anonymised) paper. In the submission note that you published a preprint already, but that this does not relevantly compromise the double-blindness of the peer review (as it is about allowing the reviewers too be unbiased, not about forcing them). Bonus points if you can point out other ways in which a malignant reviewer could have found your identity despite the preprint. Should the journal not be convinced and actually reject your paper because of this, they should arrive at this conclusion quickly and you waste not too much time.
On the other hand, even if you should somehow manage to unpublish your preprint from the Arxiv, search engines and similar would still connect your paper to your name for a while and thus a malignant reviewer could find out your identity anyway. Therefore, it does not matter for the double blindness at all, no matter what your stance on its purposes is.


¹ … or analogously to prevent authors from flashing in their or their affiliation’s reputation at the reviewers without them having a chance to ignore them.