Chemistry Central Blog

arXiv celebrates 20th birthday

It is 20 years this month since the launch of arXiv – a preprint server that hosts publications in physics, mathematics and computer science. arXiv can be regarded as the first major step towards open access, as for the first time scientists could publish their findings online without any financial barriers for readers to access them.

The success of arXiv can be seen in the number of articles it has handled over the past 20 years. The database now contains close to 700,000 preprints and is growing at a rate of 75,000 articles per year. This popularity has led to open access becoming an established publishing model amongst many researchers, particularly those working in high energy physics.

The success of arXiv has not been mirrored in chemistry publishing. A preprint server operated by ChemWeb was launched in July 2000, but closed four years later due to a lack of cross-publisher support. More recently, Nature Precedings was set up to report pre-publication research and preliminary findings across biology, medicine, chemistry and earth sciences, but although it has seen steady growth, chemistry continues to be underrepresented.

The Study of Open Access Publishing that was carried out last year showed that chemists were less supportive of open access than researchers in medicine and biological sciences. However, popularity amongst chemists is growing, and initiatives such as the EPSRC introducing an open access mandate should help to increase the adoption of open access within chemistry.

Posted by Bailey Fallon at 10:17    Comments (0)