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.
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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's half-a-million. CmdrTaco doesn't deal with such large numbers very often.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
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?
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 While it is great as a source of open information, one thing to bear in mind is that it is not peer reviewed, *anybody* can stick *anything* there.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.
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
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!
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.
Oh exactly. I think the future is a peer reviewed online journal. I think arXiv provides a very valuable service as is for the distribution of knowledge. Right now it has a copy of basically every particle physics paper published and I assume this is true for some other fields too. Many times I grab the arXiv copy over the journal copy as its more convient. So all the journal does is basically place a peer reviewed stamp of approval on the online arXiv paper and this could easily be replaced with a online journal in the future.
I am strongly against journal sub fees as I believe which that the knowledge contained in scientific papers (doubly so for public funded ones) should be availible to all and not only accessable to people willing to pay the high cost of a journal subscription fee. CERN is pushing open journals for that very reason and that may evolve into a respected online peer reviewed journal which will compliment arXiv nicely.
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.
But that was 1998 where a) the general population was just getting online and b) pretty much only scientists knew about arXiv. There is a lot of peer reviewed stuff on there (every paper submitted to a journal tends to be submitted) but as more less mainstream scientists have access, you regretably get more noise. Looking at Oct 2007 for hep-th and assuming that it would be mentioned in the summary is its published or going to be published (and trust me people mention this...), out of the first 25, 12 are published in a journal and or conference proceedings. So less than 50% were blessed by some form of peer review. And its the other 50% tend to be the most sensational :)
Note I still think its very valuable for to have a place where non-peer reviewed material can be uploaded as well as peer reviewed but if its not peer-reviewed its a lot more likely to be incorrect somehow and the reader needs to be aware of that.