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August 14, 1991, was a seemingly uneventful day in the history of science. But on that day, a new model of scientific publishing—the preprint server—was birthed, and the three decades since have seen the phenomenon grow into a substantial avenue of information dissemination.
For around a year prior to this date, astrophysicist Joanne Cohn, then at Princeton University, had been maintaining an email list that she used to share unreviewed manuscripts, mostly on the topic of string theory, among a group of theoretical physicists. In the summer of 1991, Cohn chatted with physicist Paul Ginsparg at a workshop held at the Aspen Center for Physics. Ginsparg, who had recently taken a position at Los Alamos National Laboratory, had been part of Cohn’s original email list and asked her about automating mailings to her list. According to Cohn, he offered to work on a system that would ...
