History
The arXiv was originally developed by Paul Ginsparg, in part to supersede a multinational email distribution list for preprints that had been operated manually by Joanne Cohn for about two years. It started in August 1991 as a repository for preprints in physics and later expanded to include astronomy, mathematics, computer science, nonlinear science, quantitative biology and, most recently, statistics. It soon became obvious that there was a demand for long term preservation of preprints. The term e-print was adopted to describe the articles. Ginsparg was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002 for his establishment of arXiv.
It was originally hosted at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and called the LANL preprint archive. Its original domain name was xxx.lanl.gov. It is now hosted and operated by Cornell University, with 14 mirrors around the world. It changed its name and address to arXiv.org in 1999 for greater flexibility.
Its existence was one of the precipitating factors that led to the current movement in scientific publishing known as open access. Mathematicians and scientists regularly upload their papers to arXiv.org for worldwide access and sometimes for reviews before they are published in peer-reviewed journals.
The operation of arXiv is currently funded by Cornell University Library. In 2010, Cornell has sought to broaden the financial funding of the project by asking institutions to make annual voluntary contributions based on the amount of downloading utilization by each institution. Annual donations will vary in size between $2,300 to $4,000, based on each institution’s usage. As of 16 February 2010 (2010 -02-16), 27 institutions have pledged support on this basis. The annual budget for arXiv is $400,000 for 2010.
It has been announced that, beginning in September 2011, Cornell will completely take responsibility for the operation of the project, without the further participation of Ginsparg, who is quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education as saying it "was supposed to be a three-hour tour, not a life sentence".
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