Scientific Preprint Archive Showdown

August 24, 2009

Chafing under apparent restrictions on the posting of scientific and mathematical papers before publication at the well-known arXiv.org preprint server, a physicist in the United Kingdom has set up a rival service at viXra.org that places no limitations on the sorts of papers it hosts.

"This is an experiment to find out what kind of stuff is not managing to get into the arXiv, as well as being a serious archive for people to put their research in," website creator Philip Gibbs told Physics World.

Physicists and mathematicians have long turned to arXiv, operated by Cornell University, as the preferred host for pre-publication versions of scientific papers. It has so far archived more than half a million preprints. However, some critics have argued that the preprint archive's two-step screening process may be biased and that legitimate papers may be excluded. Authors have to gain the approval of recognized endorsers and their preprints must fit in specific subject categories.

"The arXiv is really trying to filter out the stuff that is not following the same line of argument that's being followed already," Gibbs claimed. "You need to give people the freedom to try the approaches that they think will work."

Columbia University mathematician Peter Woit agreed, having seen a "disturbing ideological bias and lack of transparency" when criticisms of preprints on string theory or multiverses were removed from arXiv . At the same time, "I'm quite sympathetic to the difficulties they face evaluating preprints in fields where research is often very speculative," he noted.

So far, viXra.org has posted only a handful of mathematics papers.

Source: Physics World, July 15, 2009.