"My education into open access began over 40 years ago, when I was a practicing theoretical high energy physicist. This was in the 1970’s – in the days of typewriters – and in those days we typed up our research papers, made 100 xerox copies and submitted the original to Physical Review, Nuclear Physics or whatever journal we wanted. The copies were sent round to our ‘peer’ high energy physics research groups around the world and were known as ‘preprints’. While the paper copy to the journal was undergoing refereeing, these preprints allowed researchers to immediately build upon and refer to work done by other researchers prior to publication. This was the preprint tradition in the fast moving field of high energy physics. When papers were accepted for publication, the references to preprints that had since been published were usually updated in the published version. It has always baffled me – now that I work in the field of computer science that if anything is even faster moving than high energy physics – that there is no similar tradition...
With the widespread availability of the Internet, and with the advent of the World Wide Web, theoretical physicist Paul Ginsparg set up a web site to save high energy physicists both the postage and the trouble of circulating preprints. The electronic version of the preprint – inevitably called an e-Print – is typically submitted to a journal and simultaneously posted to the arXiv website (http://arxiv.org/). This is now the standard method of scholarly communication of a very large fraction of the physics, astronomy and mathematics communities... ‘arXiv is the primary daily information source for hundreds of thousands of researchers in physics and related fields. Its users include 53 physics Nobel laureates, 31 Fields medalists and 55 MacArthur fellows, as well as people in countries with limited access to scientific materials. The famously reclusive Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman posted the proof for the 100-year-old Poincaré Conjecture solely in arXiv.’Reference: http://phys.org/news142785151.html#jCp
The arXiv repository is now over 20 years old and has a submission rate of over 7,000 e-Prints per month and full text versions of over half a million research papers are available free both to researchers and to the general public. More than 200,000 articles are downloaded from arXiv each week by about 400,000 users. Most, but not all, of the e-Prints are eventually published in a journal and this amounts to a sort of post-publication ‘quality stamp’. The apparent drawback of multiple, slightly different versions of a paper turns out not to be a serious drawback in practice. Citation counts for high energy physicists usually count either the e-Print version or the published version. A detailed study of the arXiv system by Anne Gentil-Beccot, Salvatore Mele and Travis C. Brooks is published as ‘Citing and Reading Behaviours in High-Energy Physics. How a Community Stopped Worrying about Journals and Learned to Love Repositories’. The paper is, of course, available as arXiv:0906.5418. In the terminology of today, arXiv represents a spectacularly successful example of ‘Green Open Access’... Why should you care? ..."