Translated material
Twenty years later
Two decades on the World Wide Web
August 1991 will go down in history for many reasons. Even before the coup, several important events took place. Many people trace the history of the World Wide Web back to August 6, 1991. It was on this day that Tim Berners -Lee published the World Wide Web project in the news group alt.hypertext. And on August 14, the first article appeared in the Electronic Preprint Archive, created by Paul Ginsparg (by the way, the same age as Tim Berners-Lee, both were born in 1955). Both events significantly changed the lives of scientists.
The advent of cheap, easily accessible means of communication and hosting large volumes of data has become extremely important for the development of science in the last two decades. There is no point in describing for a long time what great opportunities the Internet gives scientists. In addition, a lot has already been written about the WWW anniversary, and even more will be written. Therefore, let's concentrate on the Archive.
The Preprint Archive arose from the need to quickly exchange articles that had only just been submitted to journals for review or had just been accepted for publication. It was common practice to send out printed versions of preprints. However, this turned out to be both time-consuming and expensive. The development of network communications made it possible to qualitatively change the mechanism for exchanging preprints.
The first version of the Archive functioned via email and ftp. appeared Later, the well-known website xxx.lanl.gov . Now the main site is arxiv.org , supported by Cornell University. There are also several mirrors, including in Russia ( ru.arxiv.org - supported by ITEP).
Starting with high-energy theoretical physics, the Archive quickly grew. And now scientists working in various fields - from mathematics to quantitative biology, from astrophysics to quantitative finance, from accelerator physics to computer science - begin their day by reading the latest publications in the Archive.
The idea of the Archive is that authors submit their own articles. There is no peer review, however, firstly, there are moderators who review new submissions for compliance. Secondly, several years ago we had to introduce a system in which new participants in the project cannot directly post their articles for the first time - the approval of someone who already has access is required. Such a “filter” allows us to somewhat reduce the share of articles from “alternatively gifted” (in general, there are surprisingly few such publications in the Archive).
Once upon a time it all started with a dozen articles a month on high-energy physics. The Archive now receives more than 6,000 articles every month, and this number continues to grow linearly over time. The total number of publications is approaching 700,000. Interestingly, many areas have already reached saturation. Thus, high-energy physics consistently brings in more than 700 articles per month, and this number has not been growing for 10 years. But now mathematicians are making a big contribution, posting more than 1000 preprints per month.
Articles from the Archive may be sent to a journal, may be a book or dissertation, or may be published only in the Archive. The most famous and striking example is the work of Grigory Perelman on the Poincaré conjecture, which was not published anywhere except the Archive.
Research has shown that posting an article in the Archive significantly increases its citation rate, which is not surprising. The vast majority of journals are calm about the fact that articles appear in the Archive. Even Nature is not indignant about posting e-prints of its publications on the Internet. Thus, the Archive greatly facilitates access to scientific articles for those who do not have journal subscriptions.
The archive does not provide bibliometric information (for example, citations), but it is well integrated with many bibliographic databases (primarily SPIRES and NASA ADS). There are other databases that index the Archive. For example, citebase.org , created by Tim Brody and associated with the eprints.org project .
The archive, of course, does not replace the existence of high-quality journals with a well-structured peer review system. When looking through articles in the Archive, you pay attention to whether the article has been accepted into a serious journal. It is almost impossible to monitor the entire flow of information even in a relatively narrow area (say, cosmology), so reliable filters are needed. Journals fulfill this role, and the Archive does not seek to take on it. But the Archive fulfills its role as an aggregator of publications, and with free access, perfectly.
Although free for authors and users, the Archive still requires funds. Now it's about half a million dollars a year (about a few dollars per new article). The bulk of the budget comes from donations from various organizations. These are mainly American, European and Japanese universities and foundations. In 2010 and 2011 More than a hundred organizations from a dozen countries have supported the Archive, collectively contributing more than $300,000 annually. The main expenses are the salaries of several people involved in the support and development of the Archive. It takes little to pay for communication services, upgrades and replacement of equipment - less than $50 thousand. in year. The project is primarily supported by Cornell University.
The archive will expand, covering more and more new areas of science. But project managers don't strive for growth for growth's sake. The appearance of a new section in the Archive requires the involvement of qualified moderators, as well as a preliminary analysis of the demand for the Archive in this area of knowledge and growth prospects.
PS And also, on August 12, the personal computer turned 30 years old. In 1981, IBM introduced the IBM PC 5150, which heralded the revolution that made personal computers an integral part of modern life.