Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Musings on the evolution and future of arXiv

Paul Ginsparg, Scholarly Information Network, Lecture Notes in Physics 650, 313-336 (2004). Only the abstract is freely available online:
I review the background and some recent trends of a particular scholarly information network, arXiv.org, and discuss some of its implications for new scholarly publication models. If we were to start from scratch today to design a quality-controlled archive and distribution system for scientific and technical information, it could take a very different form from what has evolved in the past decade from pre-existing print infrastructure. Near-term advances in automated classification systems, authoring tools, and document formats will facilitate efficient datamining and long-term archival stability, and I discuss how these could provide not only more efficient means of accessing and navigating the information, but also more cost-effective means of authentication and quality control. Finally, I illustrate the use of machine learning techniques to analyze, structure, maintain, and evolve a large online corpus of academic literature. An emerging field of research can be identified as part of an existing corpus, permitting the implementation of a more coherent community structure for its network of practitioners.

Thanks to Christina Pikas for the (relatively) abbreviated link.