Library Briefings

E-prints, blogs, and the future of scholarly communication

Tools such as arXiv are changing the way scientists publish

While some questions have simple answers (the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42, as Douglas Adams tells us in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), other questions have no single answer. For example, no one knows the answer to the question of the future of scholarly communication, though we suspect that the answer will be complex, and certainly part of the answer will be arXiv (the central letter is the Greek "Chi," and thus the word is pronounced "archive").

arXiv -- http://arxiv.org/ -- is a free e-print service in the fields of physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, and quantitative biology, established in 1991 by Paul Ginsparg, then at Los Alamos and now at Cornell. arXiv is so well established in some areas of physics that, as one physicist put it, "Most people [he meant "physicists"] these days post to the arxiv before they even send their papers to a journal, and some have stopped submitting to journals altogether... And nobody actually reads the journals -- they serve exclusively as ways to verify that your work has passed peer review."

Researchers in fields served by arXiv submit their publications online; their papers are made available the following day to anyone in the world, and are stored in perpetuity. The acceptance of arXiv in some fields, while other fields show little or no interest (as yet) in online pre-print servers, may be related to the sociology of particular disciplines (though some other fields, such as philosophy of science
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/ and cognitive science http://cogprints.org/ now make substantial use of e-prints.) At the same time, as new features are adopted by arXiv, this model may become more attractive to scholars in other fields. Some time ago, for example, arXiv introduced RSS feeds (also found in Library Briefings!) to its site as a way to help researchers keep up with new publications in their fields.

The latest new feature in arXiv is "trackback," a device known to readers of "blogs" (web logs). Just as a blog trackback links a blog posting to mentions of it in other blogs, a trackback in arXiv connects the abstract of an arXiv article to a mention of that article in a web page. Thus an arXiv paper can easily start a "conversation" with comments traded back and forth. Further information may be found at the blogs Cosmic Variance and Crooked Timber, as well as at arXiv. If successful, the use of trackback in arXiv may lead to the development of blogs as tools for researchers (see http://cosmicvariance.com/2005/07/23/the-blog-as-a-sharp-tool-for-research/.

Robert Michaelson