By Michael Banks
The arXiv preprint server received its millionth paper on 25 December 2014 – a major milestone for the repository, which was set up by the physicist Paul Ginsparg in 1991.
Cornell University’s arXiv has its roots in xxx.lanl.gov – a server set up by Ginsparg, who at the time was at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to share preprints in high-energy physics. It was originally intended for about 100 submissions per year, but rapidly grew in users and scope, receiving 400 submissions in its first half year.
Renamed in late 1998 as arXiv, the idea had already caught on fast, and by 2001, when Ginsparg moved to Cornell, the renamed server was storing thousands of preprints in different areas of physics and maths every month. Now arXiv is the first port of call for many physicists wanting to track the latest papers without having to wait for the peer-reviewed and corrected versions to appear in journals.
Funded by the Simons Foundation, Cornell University Library, as well as 179 member libraries and research laboratories from 22 countries, arXiv is supported by 150 volunteers who moderate submissions to check that the papers are not nonsense, are of at least “refereeable” quality and that they qualify for one of the repositories main subject categories. Yet while it now holds more than a million papers, not all will be of the required standard to make it through peer review and be published in a journal.
arXiv’s growth has been impressive. While it took some 17 years to hit 500,000 papers, reaching that number in October 2008, it only took six additional years to reach a million. Today, arXiv receives about 8000 articles every month. Indeed, Ginsparg says that arXiv has now added an additional digit to its identifiers so that it can accommodate more than 10,000 submissions each month. So, instead of a paper having an identifier of 1411.0001, for example (the first four digits representing the month and year and the remainder being a cumulative count), it will now be 1501.00001.
So what next for arXiv? Ginsparg notes that the significance of 1,000,000 is just “the base 10 accident that we happen to have 10 fingers”, so he says that 1048,576 (220) is a more important number. “[This] should be sometime in June,” he adds.
