Inside arXiv—the Most Transformative Platform in All of Science
upstart writes:
Modern science wouldn't exist without the online research repository known as arXiv. Three decades in, its creator still can't let it go.:
Nearly 35 years ago, 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."
[...] In 2021, the journal Nature declared arXiv one of the "10 computer codes that transformed science," praising its role in fostering scientific collaboration. (The article is behind a paywall-unlock it for $199 a year.) By a recent count, arXiv hosts more than 2.6 million papers, receives 20,000 new submissions each month, and has 5 million monthly active users. Many of the most significant discoveries of the 21st century have first appeared on the platform. The "transformers" paper that launched the modern AI boom? Uploaded to arXiv. Same with the solution to the Poincare conjecture, one of the seven Millennium Prize problems, famous for their difficulty and $1 million rewards. Just because a paper is posted on arXiv doesn't mean it won't appear in a prestigious journal someday, but it's often where research makes its debut and stays openly available. The transformers paper is still routinely accessed via arXiv.
For scientists, imagining a world without arXiv is like the rest of us imagining one without public libraries or GPS. But a look at its inner workings reveals that it isn't a frictionless utopia of open-access knowledge. Over the years, arXiv's permanence has been threatened by everything from bureaucratic strife to outdated code to even, once, a spy scandal. In the words of Ginsparg, who usually redirects interview requests to an FAQ document-on arXiv, no less-and tried to talk me out of visiting him in person, arXiv is "a child I sent off to college but who keeps coming back to camp out in my living room, behaving badly."
[...] Long before arXiv became critical infrastructure for scientific research, it was a collection of shell scripts running on Ginsparg's NeXT machine. In June 1991, Ginsparg, then a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory, attended a conference in Colorado, where a fateful encounter took place.
[...] When arXiv started, it wasn't a website but an automated email server (and within a few months also an FTP server). Then Ginsparg heard about something called the "World Wide Web." Initially skeptical-"I can't really pay attention to every single fad"-he became intrigued when the Mosaic browser was released in 1993. Soon after, Ginsparg built a web interface for arXiv, which over time became its primary mode of access. He also occasionally consulted with a programmer at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) named Tim Berners-Lee-now Sir Tim "Inventor of the World Wide Web" Berners-Lee-whom Ginsparg fondly credits with grilling excellent swordfish at his home in the French countryside.
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