Paul Ginsparg, The global-village pioneers, PhysicsWorld, October 1, 2008. A very enjoyable reminiscence over an important career, including the launch of arXiv. Excerpt:
...For purely practical reasons, authors at the time [1980s] used to post photocopies of their newly minted articles to only a small number of people. Those lower in the food chain relied on the beneficence of those on the A-list, and aspiring researchers at non-elite institutions were frequently out of the privileged loop entirely. This was a problematic situation, because, in principle, researchers prefer that their progress depends on working harder or on having some key insight, rather than on privileged access to essential materials....
At the Aspen Center for Physics, in Colorado, in the summer of 1991, a stray comment from a physicist, concerned about e-mailed articles overrunning his disk allocation while travelling, suggested to me the creation of a centralized automated repository and alerting system, which would send full texts only on demand. That solution would also democratize the exchange of information, levelling the aforementioned research playing field, both internally within institutions and globally for all with network access. Thus was born xxx.lanl.gov, initially an e-mail/FTP server....
Not everyone appreciated just how rapidly things were progressing. In early 1994 I happened to serve on a committee advising the APS about putting Physical Review Letters online. I suggested that a Web interface along the lines of the xxx.lanl.gov prototype might be a good way for the APS to disseminate its documents. A response came back from another committee member: “Installing and learning to use a World Wide Web browser is a complicated and difficult task — we can’t possibly expect this of the average physicist.” So the APS went with a different (and short-lived) platform....
In the direction of less-than-anticipated change, a decade and a half ago I certainly would not have expected the current metastable state in physics publications, of preprint servers happily coexisting with conventional online publications, the two playing different roles....
Update (3/17/09). A non-OA version of this article appeared in the April 2009 issue of Learned Publishing.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/03/2008 05:17:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
