A story in today’s Wired Campus notes the 20th birthday of arXiv. Originally founded as a preprint server for high-energy physics, it is now perhaps the most successful disciplinary repository around–it holds “700,000 full texts, receives 75,000 new texts each year, and serves roughly 1 million full-text downloads to about 400,000 distinct users every week” (Ginsparg in Nature–see reference below).
Paul Ginsparg, its founder and director since its inception, announces his departure and reflects on the implications of arXiv for scholarly communication in a piece in the August 11th issue of Nature. The Wired Campus item mentions the community support that has helped fund the continuation of arXiv. The University of Iowa Libraries is one of the 85 institutions contributing to that support.
