The electronic preprint server that revolutionized communication among physicists moved in late summer from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to Cornell University, along with its creator, string theorist Paul Ginsparg, who has taken a joint position in physics and computer information science.
Physicists in every corner of the world can start their day by checking postings on the e-print arXiv (arXiv.org), which has made new results rapidly accessible to everyone, not just, as in earlier times, to a select circle of researchers and large labs that sent each other preprints. "The tempo of research has been accelerated by the archive, and it's democratized physics," says Peter Lepage, chair of Cornell's physics department. Ginsparg predicts postings this year will reach 35 000--roughly 135 per weekday.
The move--which coincided with the e-print arXiv's 10th anniversary--is a good thing, says Martin Blume, editor of the American Physical Society (APS) journals. "I won't say Paul was unappreciated at Los Alamos, but what he did was peripheral, whereas now he'll be at the center of things." Adds Ed Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, "I hope that the move will put the archive's existence on a stable basis, without the occasional crisis it suffered at LANL."
Ginsparg, who earned his PhD at Cornell 20 years ago, says he moved mainly for personal and family reasons. But LANL was an unpredictable guardian to the archive: "At a weapons lab, a project like this has never been central to the overall mission," says Ginsparg, adding that "middle managerial pettiness and small-mindedness" were "pertinent" to his decision to leave. "For example, after I'd finally succeeded in finding some secure space for the main server--a whole few square feet of floor space--in fall 1999, my division office almost immediately permitted the space to be taken away by another project."
For its part, LANL issued a statement by deputy director William Press, saying, "We are sorry to see Paul leave Los Alamos, but proud to have been the birthplace of his revolution in the way that scientists communicate." LANL will remain the primary backup site for the e-print arXiv (previously known as the Los Alamos e-Print Server).
The archive joins Cornell's budding digital libraries program. In June, for example, the university became a mirror site for PROLA, an online archive of APS journals dating back to 1893, the year Physical Review was launched at Cornell. "We are very interested in the transformation of scholarly communications," says Cornell librarian Sarah Thomas. "The archive is a highly successful model of how a community looks at research in its field. It's become very timely, and very democratic. That is also our mission in libraries--to make information freely available to everyone. It's a logical fit."
"The archive is challenging the orthodox views about how information is handled in physics, and there are a lot of issues that still have to be worked out," says Lepage. Having it at Cornell will be nice for the physics department, he adds, but most exciting are the broader implications: "It's been taken out of a fairly restricted intellectual environment, and the possibilities for spreading its insight and developing new ideas for other fields are rich."
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