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Paul Ginsparg. (Courtesy: Cornell University)
By Michael Banks
The arXiv preprint server received its millionth paper on 25 December 2014 – a major milestone for the repository, which was set up by the physicist Paul Ginsparg in 1991.
Cornell University’s arXiv has its roots in xxx.lanl.gov – a server set up by Ginsparg, who at the time was at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to share preprints in high-energy physics. It was originally intended for about 100 submissions per year, but rapidly grew in users and scope, receiving 400 submissions in its first half year.
Renamed in late 1998 as arXiv, the idea had already caught on fast, and by 2001, when Ginsparg moved to Cornell, the renamed server was storing thousands of preprints in different areas of physics and maths every month. Now arXiv is the first port of call for many physicists wanting to track the latest papers without having to wait for the peer-reviewed and corrected versions to appear in journals.
Funded by the Simons Foundation, Cornell University Library, as well as 179 member libraries and research laboratories from 22 countries, arXiv is supported by 150 volunteers who moderate submissions to check that the papers are not nonsense, are of at least “refereeable” quality and that they qualify for one of the repositories main subject categories. Yet while it now holds more than a million papers, not all will be of the required standard to make it through peer review and be published in a journal.
arXiv’s growth has been impressive. While it took some 17 years to hit 500,000 papers, reaching that number in October 2008, it only took six additional years to reach a million. Today, arXiv receives about 8000 articles every month. Indeed, Ginsparg says that arXiv has now added an additional digit to its identifiers so that it can accommodate more than 10,000 submissions each month. So, instead of a paper having an identifier of 1411.0001, for example (the first four digits representing the month and year and the remainder being a cumulative count), it will now be 1501.00001.
So what next for arXiv? Ginsparg notes that the significance of 1,000,000 is just “the base 10 accident that we happen to have 10 fingers”, so he says that 1048,576 (220) is a more important number. “[This] should be sometime in June,” he adds.
The preprint-server arXiv, where the submitted papers’ contents are filtered through for a reasoable quality, is a good way for the researchers to present their work for appraisal and criticism before they are peered for the final ptblication.
Trackback: Physics Viewpoint | Milestone for preprint server
There’s too much in the way of censorship on the arXiv. For example, a paper arXiv:1108.4860 discussing Wheeler’s idea that observer-participation might explain all of physics was totally barred from crossposting to the quantum physics section which is the section that it most naturally fits, while conference proceedings that my co-editor and I decided to make freely available as it was long out of print was placed on hold for 4 months, allegedly to allow moderators to decide on the most appropriate section! At http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/articles/arxiv_correspondence.html you can read about Cornell’s disingenuous responses to criticisms of how arXiv is run.
Brian Josephson’s analysis and evaluation of the role of the Moderators of the preprints contributed to the arXiv is quite pertinent. Let us hope the role of moderation could be and would be sharpened. However,if there is some “bad faith” here in the moderation process, one has to be aware that this bad faith also shows up sometime in the refereed and peered journals due to certain partisan interests and group lobbies.
Finally, it is clear that overall the arXiv is doing commendable job for the rapid diffusion of scientific preprints.
I managed to reach B. Josephson’s paper: “Biological Observer-Participation and Wheeler’s Law without Law” submitted to arXiv. The phrase “Observer-Participation” per se has, indeed, a Quantum Mechanical sense that reality shows up only, when a particle’s wavefunction representing its probability distribution in space is tackled and destroyed by an observer: detector. Hence, normally, the contribution should have been shunted to the QM-section of the arXiv, but the preceding word “biology” may lead to ambiguity in the choice. However, the communication between the two parties should have helped to eliminate the ambiguity.
Two comments. In the physics archives humour articles are accepted, but they are posted in the General Physics sub-archive, so it is impossible to spot them, as happens with my article 1004.4206. I tried to convince them to start a Humour in Physics sub-archive, buy they refused. Also, I wrote an historical article, 1101.0135, of interest for the theoretical physics community and they put it again in the General Physics sub-archive, refusing to cross-list it to the hep-th and to the historical archives.