Slashdot Mirror
Free Online Scientific Repository Hits Milestone
ocean_soul writes "Last week the free and open access repository for scientific (mainly physics but also math, computer sciences...) papers arXiv got past 500,000 different papers, not counting older versions of the same article. Especially for physicists, it is the number-one resource for the latest scientific results. Most researchers publish their papers on arXiv before they are published in a 'normal' journal. A famous example is Grisha Perelman, who published his award-winning paper exclusively on arXiv."
When I was a freshman at the University of Minnesota, a professor instructed us to use Arxiv as a resource (I think Citeseer was another but paled in comparison). A large part of my undergrad and grad school days were spent perusing Arxiv and sometimes implementing ideas I had read in the Computer Science section. My hard drive became strained by the sheer number of PDF/PS files in my user directory. My room was littered with papers printed off to read on the bus or at work. My base knowledge of computer science I owe to my professors, most of the things beyond that came from Arxiv.
...
I owe a lot of my knowledge to that site. Here's to another 50,000 papers, Arxiv. And another and another and another
Also, the Arxiv Physics blog is a regular favorite in my Liferea news feed account.
My work here is dung.
i'll beat all the cynical punch savvy posters to the punch!
that comma is in the wrong place, i see 50,0000. I guess they need another article on properly writing numbers.
It is also the number one resource for new math papers. Almost every mathematician puts their papers up on the arXiv way before they are published.
It's brilliant, and I love it!
Their collision rates will go through the roof unless they have accident forgivness.
is that a typo for 50,000 or 500,000?
Here are some in fields I follow :
In astrophysics, almost all new papers appear first in Arxiv.
In planetary physics, some but by no means all papers appear in Arxiv.
In geophysics, basically no papers appear in Arxiv.
I don't know why there are these differences, but there it is.
If it's a science publication, should it have hit a kilometer-stone instead of a milestone?
But the question we are all asking ourselves is
Who got the first post?
The answer is Exact Black String Solutions in Three Dimensions by James H. Horne and Gary T. Horowitz
Slightly better than the "Fkrst Pist" attempts on Slashdot!
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Because quantity == quality...
Where are my pants? The protons got them.
I'm not going to pretend 50,000 is a lot, but the fact it's 50,000 and growing should make them worry. I hope the celebration of this milestone will help accelerate it's growth so we see 100,000 sooner than later. The quicker pay-for-access science disappears the better for all of us.
Oh honey look... How cute... an angry slashdotter!
It seems that a lot of people follow their field by reading pre-prints posted to arXiv. Isn't this kind of dangerous, considering the lack of peer-review? Or is there no problem because people only actually _use_ the results after they have been published in a proper journal?
I've seen that they've started a system where you need an endorsement from another arXiv author to post a pre-print, but is an endorsement enough, considering the likely fact that endorsers don't really check the paper properly?
Congralculations on that SCIgen benchmark!
Do not trust this signature.
cat /dev/null
By the way, who moderated the post pointing out that the comma was in the wrong place as "offtopic"?? The proper moderation is "insightful", since at least half the commenters in the discussion following seem to think that the comma was right and the extra zero at the end wrong.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Vegeta! What does the arXiv say about their number of articles?
It's fifty ten THOUSAAAAAND!!!
3. Profit!
2. ???
1. On Soviet Slashdot, a Beowulf cluster of alien Natalie Portman overlords welcomes YOU!
Wow, that's a lot of ten-thousands of papers!
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
But note that there is no impediment in order to publish just-online peer reviewed journals... maybe that's the future or arXiv. Paper must die, it just creates silly troubles... we end needing, for example, sites like JSTOR in order to access out of print numbers or foreign non imported titles.
I thought it was the third zero that was wrong.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Not insightful, but informative.
He's not showing any insight here. Instead, he's presenting information.
You suck. Now THAT's insight.
I just pooped your party.
PubMed Central, the central repository for open access Life Sciences research articles, is pushing on 1.3 million articles. These repositories is a wet dream of text mining researchers.
I thought it was the third zero that was wrong.
Looks like a lot of people thought the same thing.
In fact, though, it was the comma that was wrong, the zeros that were right.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
You jest, but if what very, very little I understand of Japanese is in order... Well, maybe our great Taco has merely been watching too much anime.
In Japanese, ten-thousand is "man" (pronounced with an "a" somewhat like the "a" in "father": "mahn"). What we would call "five hundred thousand" would instead be called "go-jyu man" ("go" = "five", "jyu" = "tens", and "man" = "ten-thousands": "five tens, ten-thousands"). So, basically, "fifty ten-thousands" would be a fairly accurate English representation of Japanese-style numbering.
Of course, my Japanese is only slightly better than my Lisp, so don't put this in Wikipedia or anything. ;)
*whoosh*
I realize that you were being snarky, but you accidentally hit on a corner of the truth. The real value of the ArXiV is indeed its quantity of results, mixed with the ease of access. The traditional journals typically restrict access to their output -- unless you are at a subscribing institution, it costs $15-$50 to access a single article from a single traditional scientific journal (depending on publisher). At professional institutes and universities, which typically have online subscriptions to journals, it is possible to surf through the Literature (depending on field, back about 10-15 years) and find recent relevant knowledge extremely quickly. If you aren't at an institution that subscribes, you're SOL. ArXiV fixes that - if you publish your article both in a journal and in the ArXiV, most indexing services will notice that it is the same, and suddenly everyone on the planet has unrestricted access. That's a no-brainer for an author.
The way that professional scientists (like me -- I am a solar astrophysicist) access the Literature has changed drastically in the last ten years. My office has about 12 linear feet of Xeroxed journal articles in three-ring binders, but I practically never refer to them. It's far faster and more convenient to access (say) the entire archives of Astrophysical Journal online than to go "grep dead trees" at the library. Citation indices such as ADS (Google for adsabs) hyperlink both references and citations, so that I can search through 50 articles relevant to a topic in less time than it used to take to look up one article and Xerox it for reading outside the library.
Old-style pay-to-read journals get in the way of that rapid access - for example, I have rarely cited articles in Astronomy and Astrophysics, because it's a pain in my ass to download them. Until recently, my institute didn't subscribe, so I had to either pay on a per-article basis (which adds up if you are skimming for the one relevant article in a dozen possibilities), or travel to the local university to get the paper I wanted. This is a very common problem: even large universities generally don't subscribe to all the relevant journals in a given field, because web subscriptions cost thousands to tens of thousands of dollars per year per journal!
For everyone not fortunate enough to have a computer account at a large institute that can actually afford to subscribe to dozens of journals, ArXiV is the best way to access a large volume of the literature. Hence, articles posted to the ArXiV get cited more. That makes authors want to post to the ArXiV as a matter of course. It's a virtuous circle.
So, er, yes, quantity is quality in this case -- ArXiV was canny and/or lucky enough to get a critical mass of good work, and the quantity is the driving force that keeps the whole thing going.
It is with great joy that I watch those who feel entitled to withhold knowledge in order to benefit their own avaricious needs by controlling the dissemination of popular art and science (starting with the Church to todays corporate greedy) - lose their hold on said resources faster than you can say Wall Street Meltdown. Kudos to the Internet and all those who espouse the FREE exchange of ideas.
A man spends the first half of his life accumulating stuff, the second trying to get rid of it all.
We really need to begin compiling our scientific knowledge into a hyperlinked wiki/database of sorts.
Wikipedia's great for basic stuff, though there's still gobs of information (much of which is in the public domain) that's inexplicably confined to books and journals.
Hyperlinks (and extended data sets) should be *standard* for all journal articles these days, given that we have the technology to do so. There's no reason that the arXiv needs to remain as a repository for dead-tree PDFs.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
To clarify, arxiv is a document repository (you submit your papers there). If you want a scientific papers search engine, use citeseer.
Note that citeseer also indexes arxiv documents :)
my scientific paper must have been quite controversial whe submitted to arxiv some years ago - i got banned and blacklisted and are not able to publish anything more on arxiv ...
this paper included honest result of three years research on the topic of dimensionality of physical systems.
i am very disappointed by the arxiv moderators because of this !
If I publish a paper to arXiv, is it peer reviewed before being posted, or is it just accepted? Just curious
Currently hooked on AMP
was the original .. with the skull/crossbones icon. Now its all too easy and happy looking.
Does something like this excist for the social sciences? I'm particularly looking for Economics articles.
You know only terrorists need scientific information.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I thought most commercial journals restrict the author's right to post their papers in other formal contexts. How does it work that you can submit an article to arXiv and then also to a commercial, peer-reviewed journal without encountering any conflicts?
(I did not find any information addressing this question at http://arxiv.org/help/primer)
I did find this quote at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7179/full/451605b.html which suggests that the arXiv repository represent articles prior to submission to a commerical journal, can someone enlighten me?
"The double-blind approach is predicated on a culture in which manuscripts-in-progress are kept secret. This is true for the most part in the life sciences. But some physical sciences, such as high-energy physics, share preprints extensively through arXiv, an online repository. Thus, double-blind peer review is at odds with another 'force for good' in the academic world: the open sharing of information. The PRC survey found that highly competitive fields (such as neuroscience) or those with larger commercial or applied interests (such as materials science and chemical engineering) were the most enthusiastic about double-blinding, whereas fields with more of a tradition for openness (astronomy and mathematics) were decidedly less supportive."
Might I reccommend the four year college University of Maryland University College. They have a vast collection of electronic texts and one can access any of them while taking a (distance education) course. Just keep up your GPA and for the price of 1/4 time school you can access any journal you want. I have yet to find something (excepting textbooks) that I couldn't get either online or e-mailed to me. I personally intend to keep taking courses after I graduate just for the fact that its worlds cheaper than buying books on stuff I need to know. Disclaimer: I will in no way benefit from you having this information.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
What we need is wiki-like research, where a mass of people collaborate to finish a research project little by little, asynchronously and spontaneously, just like wikis. If you are interested see this project of mine which although still in pre-alpha mode I hope could be useful some day.