Ginsparg 2017 arXiv

Ginsparg P (2017) Preprint Déjà Vu: an FAQ. arXiv:1706.04188.

» [1]

Ginsparg P (2017) arXiv

Abstract: Twenty-six years ago, in August 1991, I spent a couple of afternoons at Los Alamos National Laboratory writing some simple software that enabled a smallgroup of physicists to share drafts of their articles via automated email transactions with acentral repository. Within a few years, the site migrated to the nascent WorldWideWeb asxxx.lanl.gov (renamed to arXiv.org in 1999) and experienced both expansion in coverageand heavy growth in usage that continues to this day. In 1998, I gave a talk to a groupof biologists — including David Lipman, Pat Brown, and Michael Eisen — at a meetingat Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) to describe the sharing of “pre-publication”articles by physicists. The talk was met with some enthusiasm and prompted the “e-biomed” proposal in the following spring (1999) by then NIH director Harold Varmus. He encouraged the creation of an NIH-run electronic archive for all biomedical researcharticles, including both a preprint server and an archive of published peer-reviewed articles, which generated significant discussion. I agreed to write a commentary [1] on Varmus’ proposal that summer (1999), in part to “comment on some of the attempts in the past half year to isolate physicists, or rather todistinguish their research practices from the rest of the scientific community, in an attemptto assert that what has been so successful and continues to grow ‘couldn’t possibly’ workin say the biological or life sciences.”

• Bioblast editor: Gnaiger E

Labels:

Preprints