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."

Comments

I Am Forever in Debt to Arxiv

[eldavojohn]

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.

There are interesting differences

[mbone]

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.