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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."
Likewise, every particle physicist also puts his paper there before they are published (my three are all there). While it is great as a source of open information, one thing to bear in mind is that it is not peer reviewed, *anybody* can stick *anything* there. This is the major reason why we still unfortunately need paper journals. We need somebody to read it and say yes this follows basic scientific procedures and to the best of his/her knowledge there are no mistakes. Because theres a fairly low signal to noise on arXiv and whats there is not guaranteed at all to be of proper scientific merit and correctness.
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.