Einstein award going to Paul Ginsparg for creating arXiv.org

Around 6 or 7 years ago, I went to a quantum computing conference and presented about a then newly developed quantum programming language that could run on a real quantum computer, showing a 1&#x2F;2 decent simulation of dihydrogen energy in terms of bond length.<p>I authored a paper about this quantum programming language but had no way to post it to the arXiv. I&#x27;m not a traditional academic, but I had posted on the arXiv before, long ago, at a previous job. Problem was that my arXiv credentials were associated with that job&#x27;s long lost email.<p>I gave the presentation in a giant ballroom, and afterward, sat down at my assigned spot at one of these large circular tables. Next to me, during a brief coffee break, an old man I didn&#x27;t recognize told me my talk was very interesting, and asked me if my paper was published yet. &quot;Not yet; we haven&#x27;t chosen a journal. And posting to the arXiv is delayed, because my account is locked, so a colleague is planning to post on my behalf.&quot;<p>The man responds, &quot;Oh, it should be possible to fix that.&quot; I said that I figured as much and have just procrastinated contacting the admins. &quot;They&#x27;re at Cornell right?&quot;<p>He said, &quot;No, I mean, <i>I</i> can fix that. You said your name was Reikon Musha right?&quot;<p>He opens his clunky laptop and continues, &quot;I&#x27;m not supposed to do this. But I&#x27;m certain that if you gave an invited talk here, you&#x27;re definitely not spoofing your name. Maybe you can show me your ID? No, no, just kidding.&quot;<p>He continues clicking around. &quot;Was xyz@example.com your old address? What&#x27;s your new one?&quot; I answered yes, and gave him my new address. He typed it in and said, &quot;straight into the database it goes; just go and reset your password now.&quot;<p>I was absolutely puzzled. I said, &quot;Thanks?? Who are you?&quot;<p>He says, as a matter of fact, &quot;I&#x27;m Paul, I invented the arXiv.&quot;

Many years ago (think: 1994) scientists (mainly CS folks) published papers on the web as postscript files. Actually, they were usually on FTP sites, not the web, as almost nobody used the web at the time. I developed a huge aversion to postscript (it was clunky and the renderers weren&#x27;t great) but the idea that every bit of published science would be freely available on the web seemed completely and totally obvious to me.<p>When I later became an academic, I learned that when you write a paper and submit it, conditions for publication typically include signing away the copyright to the journal, possibly with a license to distribute a few preprints offline.<p>My advisor at the time pointed out that he actually modified the contract (changing the terms to retain copyright), signed it and sent it back (no journal ever complained, and all his papers are available as PDFs online).<p>arxiv is the closest thing to what I dreamt of some decades ago and I&#x27;m thrilled that Paul is receiving recognition. Personally, I think arxiv is a better path forward than scihub, entirely due to its &quot;legitimacy&quot;. In the future, I will always work to &quot;publish&quot; on arxiv and not put my work in journals (fortunately, I am not in a publish or perish situation).<p>My only complaint is that I don&#x27;t particularly like PDF and wish there was an HTML-zip format that could be sent around and the browser did all the rendering work, while the udnerlying data tables are stored in well-defined formats so they can be programatically extracted.

The Nobel Prize in Physics often goes to &quot;tooling&quot; experimental work. Think: blue LEDs, CCDs, fiber optics, optical tweezers, things like that. Not that anybody asks me, but I would advocate a similar tooling award split between Berners-Lee (www), Knuth (TeX), and Ginsparg (arXiv). I can think of no people who had a more profound change in how physics is actually practiced.

just in case it hasnt clicked yet, the X is the greek letter chi, so the url is &quot;archive&quot; phonetically

ArXiv is great. I encourage anyone to submit their work there in addition to submitting to a peer-reviewed venue. Thankfully, they&#x27;re compatible with overleaf nowadays. There was a time when arxiv didn&#x27;t accept stuff from overleaf but it also didn&#x27;t accept pdfs made from latex, so I had to pdf-print my pdf to submit it to arxiv.

Well deserved. I only recently learned about the origin of arxiv and the story surrounding Joanne Cohn. Highly recommended read<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;physicstoday.scitation.org&#x2F;do&#x2F;10.1063&#x2F;PT.6.4.20211108a&#x2F;full&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;physicstoday.scitation.org&#x2F;do&#x2F;10.1063&#x2F;PT.6.4.2021110...</a>

If you&#x27;ve ever wondered about the unusual arXiv.org website favicon: The original logo was a skull with bones as reference to the piratey nature of distributing preprints without the publisher&#x27;s consent. The smiley face was added later in order to make it less offensive. Due to the conversion to a non-transparent format, the backgrond was filled with the green color.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;Whats-the-story-behind-the-arXiv-org-favicon" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;Whats-the-story-behind-the-arXiv-org-f...</a>

IN a world of leeches like Elsevier, his work is much appreciated

Neat, next award should go to Alexandra Elbakyan for creating Sci-Hub :)

The least controversial post of the year.<p>Well deserved.

Why does so many online articles refrain from adding a simple link to the product in question?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;</a>

What is the point of arxiv other than a file host but where people forcibly constrain themselves to the bureacratic process of creating a UN*X braindamaged tex &#x2F; PDF with whatever academic publishing conventions? Someone in here even has posted makefile. For analogy to the problem I am alluding to, imagine needing a makefile to write an ASCII text document. Skimming through these comments, it seems like arxiv supports some kind of search or other metadata traversal. All this stuff could be done without a centralized server. No I am not advocating for your half working p2p network, cryptocoin, or startup.

Is arXiv openly accessible in China? I tried a quick search on the topic and saw that there are quite a few mirror sites but no definitive answer.

That’s good. Sometimes I think stuff like this (supporting plumbing) moves science forward more than an individual discovery could.

Been out of research for a while, didn&#x27;t know about this. Will get my papers up there.

A worthy choice.

Completely and utterly deserved. Arxiv, like Wikipedia and arguably sci-hub, is an absolute boon to humanity. What I find interesting is that its endorsement system does largely work at making it very easy to submit papers whilst reducing the amount of spam. Sure, there are some papers that are not completely brilliant -- or indeed, actually any good at all -- but they have the same &quot;right&quot; to be read as their huge CERN brethren. In some fields of physics, paid journal publishing is really a niche in comparison to stuff on the ArXiv. In others, and other areas of science, not quite so much yet. I also very much like the fact that it is open, mostly LaTeX based (machine-readable maths!) and free.