arXiv (pronounced "archive"—the X represents
the Greek letter chi [χ]) is a repository
of electronic preprints (known as e-prints)
approved for publication after moderation.
It consists of scientific papers in the fields
of mathematics, physics, astronomy, electrical
engineering, computer science, quantitative
biology, statistics, and mathematical finance,
which can be accessed online.
In many fields of mathematics and physics,
almost all scientific papers are self-archived
on the arXiv repository.
Begun on August 14, 1991, arXiv.org passed
the half-million-article milestone on October
3, 2008, and had hit a million by the end
of 2014.
By October 2016 the submission rate had grown
to more than 10,000 per month.
== History ==
arXiv was made possible by the low-bandwidth
TeX file format, which allowed scientific
papers to be easily transmitted over the Internet
and rendered client-side.
Around 1990, Joanne Cohn began emailing physics
preprints to colleagues as TeX files, but
the number of papers being sent soon filled
mailboxes to capacity.
Paul Ginsparg recognized the need for central
storage, and in August 1991 he created a central
repository mailbox stored at the Los Alamos
National Laboratory which could be accessed
from any computer.
Additional modes of access were soon added:
FTP in 1991, Gopher in 1992, and the World
Wide Web in 1993.
The term e-print was quickly adopted to describe
the articles.
It began as a physics archive, called the
LANL preprint archive, but soon expanded to
include astronomy, mathematics, computer science,
quantitative biology and, most recently, statistics.
Its original domain name was xxx.lanl.gov.
Due to LANL's lack of interest in the rapidly
expanding technology, in 2001 Ginsparg changed
institutions to Cornell University and changed
the name of the repository to arXiv.org.
It is now hosted principally by Cornell, with
eight mirrors around the world.Its existence
was one of the precipitating factors that
led to the current movement in scientific
publishing known as open access.
Mathematicians and scientists regularly upload
their papers to arXiv.org for worldwide access
and sometimes for reviews before they are
published in peer-reviewed journals.
Ginsparg was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship
in 2002 for his establishment of arXiv.
The annual budget for arXiv is approximately
$826,000 for 2013 to 2017, funded jointly
by Cornell University Library, the Simons
Foundation (in both gift and challenge grant
forms) and annual fee income from member institutions.
This model arose in 2010, when Cornell sought
to broaden the financial funding of the project
by asking institutions to make annual voluntary
contributions based on the amount of download
usage by each institution.
Each member institution pledges a five-year
funding commitment to support arXiv.
Based on institutional usage ranking, the
annual fees are set in four tiers from $1,000
to $4,400.
Cornell's goal is to raise at least $504,000
per year through membership fees generated
by approximately 220 institutions.In September
2011, Cornell University Library took overall
administrative and financial responsibility
for arXiv's operation and development.
Ginsparg was quoted in the Chronicle of Higher
Education as saying it "was supposed to be
a three-hour tour, not a life sentence".
However, Ginsparg remains on the arXiv Scientific
Advisory Board and on the arXiv Physics Advisory
Committee.
== Moderation process and endorsement ==
Although arXiv is not peer reviewed, a collection
of moderators for each area review the submissions;
they may recategorize any that are deemed
off-topic, or reject submissions that are
not scientific papers.
The lists of moderators for many sections
of arXiv are publicly available, but moderators
for most of the physics sections remain unlisted.
Additionally, an "endorsement" system was
introduced in 2004 as part of an effort to
ensure content is relevant and of interest
to current research in the specified disciplines.
Under the system, for categories that use
it, an author must be endorsed by an established
arXiv author before being allowed to submit
papers to those categories.
Endorsers are not asked to review the paper
for errors, but to check whether the paper
is appropriate for the intended subject area.
New authors from recognized academic institutions
generally receive automatic endorsement, which
in practice means that they do not need to
deal with the endorsement system at all.
However, the endorsement system has attracted
criticism for allegedly restricting scientific
inquiry.A majority of the e-prints are also
submitted to journals for publication, but
some work, including some very influential
papers, remain purely as e-prints and are
never published in a peer-reviewed journal.
A well-known example of the latter is an outline
of a proof of Thurston's geometrization conjecture,
including the Poincaré conjecture as a particular
case, uploaded by Grigori Perelman in November
2002.
Perelman appears content to forgo the traditional
peer-reviewed journal process, stating: "If
anybody is interested in my way of solving
the problem, it's all there [on the arXiv]
– let them go and read about it".
Despite this non-traditional method of publication,
other mathematicians recognized this work
by offering the Fields Medal and Clay Mathematics
Millennium Prizes to Perelman, both of which
he refused.
== Submission formats ==
Papers can be submitted in any of several
formats, including LaTeX, and PDF printed
from a word processor other than TeX or LaTeX.
The submission is rejected by the arXiv software
if generating the final PDF file fails, if
any image file is too large, or if the total
size of the submission is too large.
arXiv now allows one to store and modify an
incomplete submission, and only finalize the
submission when ready.
The time stamp on the article is set when
the submission is finalized.
== Access ==
The standard access route is through the arXiv.org
website or one of several mirrors.
Several other interfaces and access routes
have also been created by other un-associated
organisations.
These include the University of California,
Davis's front, a web portal that offers additional
search functions and a more self-explanatory
interface for arXiv.org, and is referred to
by some mathematicians as (the) Front.
A similar function used to be offered by eprintweb.org,
launched in September 2006 by the Institute
of Physics, and was switched off on June 30,
2014.
Carnegie Mellon provides TablearXiv, a search
engine for tables extracted from arXiv publications.
Google Scholar and Live Search Academic (now
defunct) can also be used to search for items
in arXiv.
A full text and author search engine for arXiv
is provided by Scientillion.
Finally, researchers can select sub-fields
and receive daily e-mailings or RSS feeds
of all submissions in them.
== Copyright status of files ==
Files on arXiv can have a number of different
copyright statuses:
Some are public domain, in which case they
will have a statement saying so.
Some are available under either the Creative
Commons 3.0 Attribution-ShareAlike license
or the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike
license.
Some are copyright to the publisher, but the
author has the right to distribute them and
has given arXiv a non-exclusive irrevocable
license to distribute them.
Most are copyright to the author, and arXiv
has only a non-exclusive irrevocable license
to distribute them.
== Controversy ==
While arXiv does contain some dubious e-prints,
such as those claiming to refute famous theorems
or proving famous conjectures such as Fermat's
Last Theorem using only high-school mathematics,
they are "surprisingly rare".
arXiv generally re-classifies these works,
e.g. in "General mathematics", rather than
deleting them; however, some authors have
voiced concern over the lack of transparency
in the arXiv screening process.
== See also ==
bioRxiv (require preprints not yet accepted
by any journal)
Hyper Articles en Ligne
List of academic databases and search engines
List of academic journals by preprint policy
PsyArXiv
Science 2.0
Semantic Scholar
SocArxiv
Social Science Research Network
viXra
== Notes
