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."

I Am Forever in Debt to Arxiv

[eldavojohn]

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.

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 [arxivblog.com] is a regular favorite in my Liferea news feed account.

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[account_deleted]

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There are interesting differences

[mbone]

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.

Re:I Am Forever in Debt to Arxiv

[vrmlguy]

My room was littered with papers printed off to read on the bus or at work.

A good reason to buy an Amazon Kindle/Apple iPhone/Sony Reader.

What about peer-review?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems that a lot of people follow their field by reading pre-prints posted to arXiv. Isn't this kind of dangerous, considering the lack of peer-review? Or is there no problem because people only actually _use_ the results after they have been published in a proper journal?

I've seen that they've started a system where you need an endorsement from another arXiv author to post a pre-print, but is an endorsement enough, considering the likely fact that endorsers don't really check the paper properly?

Re:Fifty ten-thousand?

[Anonymous Coward]

Either that, or it's Chinese/Japanese (they group digits in sets of 4 rather than 3 like we do, so the number 500,000 would literally be spoken as "fifty ten-thousand").

In other news...

[bakuun]

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.

Re:Also #1 for mathematicians!

[Gromius]

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.

Re:Also #1 for mathematicians!

[Anonymous Coward]

But that was 1998 where a) the general population was just getting online and b) pretty much only scientists knew about arXiv.

These are valid objections, I agree.

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.

As a comparison, I did the same thing in my own field of mathematics. I looked at the first 25 articles uploaded to arXiv in October '07. As for your field, only 12 were either published or were PhD theses.

But, FWIW, from my quick look at them, there were no obious nonsense articles.

The arXiv is great, but.....

[moosesocks]

We really need to begin compiling our scientific knowledge into a hyperlinked wiki/database of sorts.

Wikipedia's great for basic stuff, though there's still gobs of information (much of which is in the public domain) that's inexplicably confined to books and journals.

Hyperlinks (and extended data sets) should be *standard* for all journal articles these days, given that we have the technology to do so. There's no reason that the arXiv needs to remain as a repository for dead-tree PDFs.

XXX.LANL.GOV

[Lawrence_Bird]

was the original .. with the skull/crossbones icon. Now its all too easy and happy looking.