Sharing is a good thing ... :)

Ginsparg in his physics office at Cornell University.

Photographs: Allison Usavage

ArXiv is the science version of Wikipedia where eprints related to the sciences are free for all to peruse and to learn from as needs warrant, something yours truly does without question because sharing information of quality is a good thing IMHO. 

It's fractal ...

Before arXiv was called arXiv, it was accessed under the hostname xxx.lanl.gov (“xxx” didn’t have the explicit connotations it does today, Ginsparg emphasized). During a car ride, he and his wife brainstormed nicer-sounding names. Archive? Already taken. Maybe they could sub in the Greek equivalent of X, chi (pronounced like “kai”). “She wrote it down and crossed out the e to make it more symmetric around the X,” Ginsparg said. “So arXiv it was.” At this point, there wasn’t much formal structure. The number of developers typically stayed at one or two, and much of the moderation was managed by Ginsparg’s friends, acquaintances, and colleagues.

Early on, Ginsparg expected to receive on the order of 100 submissions to arXiv a year. It turned out to be closer to 100 a month, and growing. “Day one, something happened, day two something happened, day three, Ed Witten posted a paper,” as Ginsparg once put it. “That was when the entire community joined.” Edward Witten is a revered string theorist and, quite possibly, the smartest person alive. “The arXiv enabled much more rapid worldwide communication among physicists,” Witten wrote to me in an email. Over time, disciplines such as mathematics and computer science were added, and Ginsparg began to appreciate the significance of this new electronic medium. Plus, he said, “it was fun.”

The biggest mystery is not why arXiv succeeded. Rather, it’s how it wasn’t killed by vested interests intent on protecting traditional academic publishing. Perhaps this was due to a decision Ginsparg made early on: Upon submission, users signed a clause that gave arXiv nonexclusive license to distribute the work in perpetuity, even in the event of future publication elsewhere. The strategic move ensured that no major publishers, known for their typically aggressive actions to maintain feudal control, would ever seriously attempt to shut it down.

 

Sharing is a good thing is it not? :)