The Preprint Revolution
Part I
In August 1991, Paul Ginsparg sat at his desk in the theoretical division of Los Alamos National Laboratory, frustrated by an absurd inefficiency. Physicists worldwide shared research by mailing photocopies through postal services. A breakthrough discovery in California might take months to reach a researcher in India or Eastern Europe, creating artificial delays that slowed global scientific progress.
Ginsparg had a radical solution: create an electronic repository where physicists could instantly share and access preprints from anywhere. His setup was modest, a 25 MHz NeXTstation with 105 MB hard drive sitting beneath his desk, initially designed to serve what he expected would be "about 100 submissions per year" from the niche high-energy physics community.
The system he built defied all expectations. Within six months, the platform received 400 submissions—four times his projected annual volume. Originally named hep-th@xxx.lanl.gov, it quickly expanded from email distribution to FTP access in 1991, Gopher in 1992, and web access as the internet evolved. His code predated search engines, chatbots, and the World Wide Web itself.
"Significant community engagement followed the launch, with Ed Witten posting a paper on the second day," Ginsparg recalled. The immediate embrace by prominent physicists like Witten signaled this wasn't just a technical experiment. The high demand signaled a rapid shift in how science would be communicated.
Resistance to preprints came quickly. Traditional journal publishers saw arXiv as an existential threat to their business model, which relied on exclusive access and subscription revenues. Academic institutions questioned whether rapid, unfiltered dissemination could maintain quality control without peer review. Some worried about professional implications for researchers who might bypass established publishing hierarchies.
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