Left: number of new submissions/year; right: same data as left, with submission rates divided by the total for each yearARXIVSince 1991, scientists from a variety of fields have published their research to the preprint server arXiv, to quickly share data and to stake intellectual claim on new discoveries.
Today (December 29), the preprint server clocked its one-millionth upload. In anticipation of this milestone, The Scientist spoke with arXiv founder Paul Ginsparg of Cornell University about sharing data, peer review, and what’s next for the resource.
The Scientist: You started arXiv to serve the physics community, but later expanded into other fields, including quantitative biology. What was the impetus to expand into the life sciences? Paul Ginsparg: Expanding into new fields has always relied on somebody from the target community to make contact. Unless the community is ready for it, and there are some members who are actively willing to organize, we don’t. In the case of biology we were contacted by a few people who happened to have been physicists turned biophysicists/biologists and ...
