arXiv Then and Now. (October 24, 2008)

Something over seven years ago TFW ran the following item:

The "Peter Principle" Remains Alive and Well in LANL's Management. (July 11, 2001)

NOUN:
The theory that employees within an organisation will advance to their highest level of competence and then be promoted to and remain at a level at which they are incompetent.

ETYMOLOGY: After Laurence Johnston Peter (1919–1990).
         [From The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition]

In May of this year we ran a News & Views piece on Paul Ginsparg who ten years ago founded arXiv which became the avenue of choice for preprints in the physical sciences. Students and researchers from Nobel laureates to undergraduates access it on a daily basis to keep up with the latest research. Among other things it has been invaluable to workers in countries where resources don't extend to journal subscriptions.

    Ginsparg will now be leaving the Los Alamos National Laboratory, under less than amicable circumstances, for Cornell University which will allow him to continue and extend arXiv using it as a model for research into digital libraries.  As Ginsparg  describes it, the last straw was a recent salary review which described him as, "a strictly average performer by overall lab standards; with no particular computer skills contributing to lab programs; easily replaced, and moreover overpaid, according to an external market survey".

    The Chair of the Department of Physics at Cornell,  Peter Lepage's  sardonic comment was, "Evidently their form didn't have a box for: 'completely transformed the nature and reach of scientific information in physics and other fields'."

    There really is no substitute for abject stupidity. But of course, as for working on a National Missile Defense system, Paul Ginsparg would probably be a dead loss.

    ______________________________________ 

    Now Professor Ginsparg has answered three questions put to him by Science:

Preamble: This month, the arXiv preprint server (http://arxiv.org/) posted its 500,000^th preprint. Created in 1991 by particle physicist Paul Ginsparg of Cornell University, the site is now the primary venue for results in many subfields of physics and also serves the mathematics, computer science, statistic, and quantitative biology communities.

Credit: Source: Paul Ginsparg

 Q: Did you ever envision that the arXiv would rack up hundreds of thousands of papers?

 No. It was originally intended for a tiny subfield of theoretical particle physics, encompassing about 100 articles per year. And the plan was to hold them only for 3 months, by which time they would be disseminated by conventional means. Happily, I never got around to deleting anything.

Q: The arXiv hasn't put journals out of business, even though many of the papers they publish appear there first. Why not?

 The journals provide both a measure of quality control and a feeling of security, like an insurance policy funded by one's institution. A decade and a half ago, I certainly would not have expected the current state in which preprint servers coexist with conventional online publications.

Q: Can researchers gain an unfair advantage by posting a slapdash manuscript and then revising the paper later?

 We've long kept a full, date-stamped revision history of every article publicly available so that disputes can be adjudicated by looking at the precise contents of a particular version from a particular date. The knowledge that every version will be archivally available also helps ensure that authors are cautious about what they submit.