Inside arXiv—the Most Transformative Platform in All of Science

Wired: “…Nearly 35 years ago, Paul Ginsparg created arXiv, a digital repository where researchers could share their latest findings—before those findings had been systematically reviewed or verified. Visit arXiv.org today (it’s pronounced like “archive”) and you’ll still see its old-school Web 1.0 design, featuring a red banner and the seal of Cornell University, the platform’s institutional home. But arXiv’s unassuming facade belies the tectonic reconfiguration it set off in the scientific community. If arXiv were to stop functioning, scientists from every corner of the planet would suffer an immediate and profound disruption. “Everybody in math and physics uses it,” Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “I scan it every night.” Every industry has certain problems universally acknowledged as broken: insurance in health care, licensing in music, standardized testing in education, tipping in the restaurant business. In academia, it’s publishing. Academic publishing is dominated by for-profit giants like Elsevier and Springer. Calling their practice a form of thuggery isn’t so much an insult as an economic observation. Imagine if a book publisher demanded that authors write books for free and, instead of employing in-house editors, relied on other authors to edit those books, also for free. And not only that: The final product was then sold at prohibitively expensive prices to ordinary readers, and institutions were forced to pay exorbitant fees for access.

The “free editing” academic publishers facilitate is called peer review, the process by which fellow researchers vet new findings. This can take months, even a year. But with arXiv, scientists could post their papers—known, at this unvetted stage, as preprints—for instant and free access to everyone. One of arXiv’s great achievements was “showing that you could divorce the actual transmission of your results from the process of refereeing,” said Paul Fendley, an early arXiv moderator and now a physicist at All Souls College, Oxford. During crises like the Covid pandemic, time-sensitive breakthroughs were disseminated quickly—particularly by bioRxiv and medRxiv, platforms inspired by arXiv—potentially saving, by one study’s estimate, millions of lives…”