Paul Ginsparg, professor of physics and information science and creator the arXiv, commemorates the website’s 20th anniversary.
As the e-print arXiv of scientific publications celebrates its 20th anniversary, what started as an effort to "level the playing field" for researchers has created a whole new playing field on which the white lines are still not clearly drawn. Long before Paul Ginsparg, professor of physics and information science, created the arXiv, it was common practice for scientists to circulate to their friends a few paper preprints of their articles before the articles appeared in scholarly journals. Ginsparg created a simple website - at first housed in a single workstation on a cluttered desk - to turn the preprints into "e-prints" made available electronically. "I've heard a lot about how democratic the arXiv is," Ginsparg said Sept. 23 in a talk commemorating the anniversary. People have, for example, praised the fact that the arXiv makes scientific papers easily available to scientists in developing countries where subscriptions to journals are not always affordable. "But what I was trying to do was set up a system that eliminated the hierarchy in my field," he said.
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