Simons Foundation Helps Scientists Share and Review Findings

 

The popular preprint server arXiv.org, where physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists routinely upload manuscripts to publicly share their findings before peer review, now holds more than 1 million research articles.

 

The repository, launched as an ‘electronic bulletin board’ in August 1991, just before the dawn of the World Wide Web, took 17 years to accumulate half a million manuscripts, but has taken just 6 more to double its holdings.

 

Researchers now submit around 8,000 articles to the arXiv each month—more than 250 a day, on average. The site’s administrators make the raw, non-peer-reviewed manuscripts available in batches after a brief quality-control check, such as a cursory glance for appropriateness by one of 130 volunteer moderators, and automated filtering to check for text overlap with existing papers....