Inside arXiv - the Most Transformative Platform in All of Science (wired.com)
(Thursday March 27, 2025 @12:10PM (msmash)
from the gamechangers dept.)
- Reference: 0176838771
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/03/27/1456239/inside-arxiv---the-most-transformative-platform-in-all-of-science
- Source link: https://www.wired.com/story/inside-arxiv-most-transformative-code-science/
Paul Ginsparg, a physics professor at Cornell University, created arXiv nearly 35 years ago as a digital repository where researchers could share their findings before peer review. Today, the platform hosts more than 2.6 million papers, receives 20,000 new submissions monthly, and serves 5 million active users, Wired [1]writes in a profile of the platform .
"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!" Ginsparg quotes from The Godfather, reflecting his inability to fully hand over the platform despite numerous attempts. If arXiv stopped functioning, scientists worldwide would face immediate disruption. "Everybody in math and physics uses it," says Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. "I scan it every night."
ArXiv revolutionized academic publishing, previously dominated by for-profit giants like Elsevier and Springer, by allowing instant and free access to research. Many significant discoveries, including the "transformers" paper that launched the modern AI boom, first appeared on the platform. Initially a collection of shell scripts on Ginsparg's NeXT machine in 1991, arXiv followed him from Los Alamos National Laboratory to Cornell, where it found an institutional home despite administrative challenges. Recent funding from the Simons Foundation has enabled a hiring spree and long-needed technical updates.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/inside-arxiv-most-transformative-code-science/
"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!" Ginsparg quotes from The Godfather, reflecting his inability to fully hand over the platform despite numerous attempts. If arXiv stopped functioning, scientists worldwide would face immediate disruption. "Everybody in math and physics uses it," says Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. "I scan it every night."
ArXiv revolutionized academic publishing, previously dominated by for-profit giants like Elsevier and Springer, by allowing instant and free access to research. Many significant discoveries, including the "transformers" paper that launched the modern AI boom, first appeared on the platform. Initially a collection of shell scripts on Ginsparg's NeXT machine in 1991, arXiv followed him from Los Alamos National Laboratory to Cornell, where it found an institutional home despite administrative challenges. Recent funding from the Simons Foundation has enabled a hiring spree and long-needed technical updates.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/inside-arxiv-most-transformative-code-science/
One question: (Score:2)
by fredrated ( 639554 )
How do you pronounce it?
Re: (Score:3)
by Jamu ( 852752 )
Same as "archive".
Re: (Score:2)
by larryjoe ( 135075 )
> How do you pronounce it?
From [1]Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], "arXiv (pronounced as "archive"—the X represents the Greek letter chi )".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv
Re: One question: (Score:2)
by Baloroth ( 2370816 )
The "X" is actually the Greek letter Ï, "chi", so "ar-ch-iv", i.e. "archive".
arXiv history (Score:2)
by larryjoe ( 135075 )
So, funding is now from the Simons Foundation, after being donated from Cornell's library and then the Computing and Information Science division. That's good that they now have the funding to hire software engineers and buy cloud resources. It's also interesting that the original code was in Perl but recently was rewritte in Python.
What they said the web would be (Score:5, Insightful)
Good for him. It seems that a) objectivity, b) basic utility, and c) lack of the drive to monetize has some value after all.
Lack of Objectivity and Problematic Monopoly (Score:3)
> It seems that a) objectivity, b) basic utility, and c) lack of the drive to monetize has some value after all.
Yes....but recently arXiv has taken actions that cannot be argued to be objective at all. It [1]banned Jorge Hirsch [science.org] a theoretical physicist from posting for 6-months because it claimed that he posted "inflammatory" papers.
These were papers that criticized claims of the discovery of room temperature superconductivity in high pressure metal hydrides. If you actually read the papers - which many of us even outside the field did because of the controversial ban - what you read was a clear, well-constructed sci
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/preprint-server-removes-inflammatory-papers-superconductor-controversy