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

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.