Physicist Paul
Ginsparg, who created and maintains the archive - known by
scientists around the world as "arXiv.org" - will join the
Cornell faculty this autumn, and he is bringing the archive
with him. It will become a service of Cornell University
Library, which has developed several other digital
academic resources. Both Ginsparg and library officials
express hope that the archive will improve and expand in its
new home.
The archive
currently is receiving about 2 million visits a week, more
than two-thirds of them from outside the United States.
There should be
many advantages to being at a private educational
institution," Ginsparg said. However, he noted, the LANL
environment was essential for launching the archive in 1991.
"It probably wouldn't have been possible had I been a
university faculty member with too many other obligations. But
now it has achieved a level of maturity which makes it
possible to institutionalise in a new and more appropriate
academic setting," he said.
 Costs and services to be
shared for time being
The arXiv has
operated with about USD300,000 in annual funding from the
National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and
LANL. For the time being, Cornell and LANL will share the
costs and services previously provided by LANL. Much key
expertise will remain at the LANL library, Ginsparg said. The
existing LANL server will become a primary backup.
Ginsparg already
has been collaborating with the Digital Library Group in
Cornell's computer science department from a distance. He will
become a member of Cornell's Faculty of Computing and
Information (FCI), a university-wide, interdisciplinary unit,
separate from but related to the computer science department.
The FCI was formed last year in recognition of the fact that
computing has become an integral part of almost every academic
discipline.
Ginsparg, who
earned his Ph.D. in physics at Cornell in 1981, expects to
divide his time equally between work on the archive and
physics research. His field is string theory. "I am eagerly
looking forward to having all the routine aspects of the arXiv
handled by information professionals so that I can focus again
on cutting edge areas in research," he said.
"I think
ultimately it will be seen as a coup for the university to
have attracted him and the archive," said Cornell University
Librarian Sarah Thomas. "It's a captivating example of how
technology has interacted with the advancement of knowledge."
But she added that she understands some people are
apprehensive about the impact online publishing of scientific
information may have on traditional journals.
3,000 new submissions
each month
The arXiv
contains some 170,000 brief papers in physics, mathematics and
computer science, with almost 3,000 new submissions coming in
each month. Unlike articles submitted to professional
journals, papers submitted to the archive are immediately
available online, at no cost to the user. Also unlike articles
submitted to professional journals, postings to arXiv.org are
not peer viewed. Except for some rudimentary screening for
inappropriate off topic submissions, almost anyone can post
almost anything. It's up to the reader to decide what is
worthwhile.
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The result,
Ginsparg has said, is to "level the playing field."
Researchers in Third World countries, where paper copies of
journals may arrive months after publication, if at all, have
the same access to research reports as do researchers in
industrialised nations. On the other side of the coin,
researchers in small, obscure places have just as much chance
to make their voices heard as those in Ivy League halls. In
one recent incident, Lubos Motl, an undergraduate physics
student at Charles University in Prague, Czechoslovakia,
scooped the Ph.D.s with an elegant solution to a major
problem. On the internet, it seems, no one knows you're an
undergraduate.
Ginsparg
believes that all scientific publishing eventually will move
to the internet, doing away with paper journals. That move
will streamline a system where, as Ginsparg puts it, scholars
give their material to publishers for free and their
institutions then pay thousands of dollars in subscription
fees to read it in the journals.
Peer review still
important to career advancement
The
compensation, up to now at least, has been that the leading
journals provide "peer review," where respected members of a
field of study read submitted articles and report to the
journal on whether or not they represent good, original
research. The prestige of passing peer review and publishing
in an established journal is still important to the careers of
academic researchers, as is the quality control provided to
the archival literature.
The papers that
appear on arXiv.org are technically "preprints," the
electronic equivalent of paper reports that researchers
circulate among themselves in advance of formal publication.
But more and more, at least in the physical sciences,
researchers are communicating new results via their online
postings, with journal publication a later formality.
Cornell
librarians hope to explore the extension of this idea into
other disciplines. "There are a number of initiatives to look
at how that would work in the biological sciences," Thomas
said. "I would want to position Cornell so that we could be a
very active contributor to the reconception of scholarly
communication." Cornell currently is engaged in a project to
facilitate the electronic publication of mathematics journals,
so far with strict controls on access. But, Thomas said, a
movement is under way to persuade publishers to allow open
access beginning several months after publication. "There are
some models that suggest that the economic value of
information [to publishers] declines sharply as it ages," she
explained.
Ginsparg will
begin transferring content to Cornell servers shortly, he
said, with the expectation that the archive will officially
move at the end of summer. For users, the transition should be
seamless. The URL will remain the same: http://arXiv.org. (The
old URL, http://xxx.lanl.gov still works and will continue to
be a primary backup site.) The move, Ginsparg said, coincides
with the 10th anniversary of the archive, as well as the 20th
anniversary of his Cornell Ph.D. and the first birthday of his
daughter.
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