What Counts as Science?
The arXiv preprint service is trying to answer an age-old question
By Kate Becker
Originally published at Nautilus on October 27, 2016.
Xxx.lanl.gov. The address was cryptic, with a tantalizing whiff of government secrets, or worse.
The server itself was exactly the opposite. Government, yes — it was hosted by Los Alamos National Laboratory — but openly accessible in a way that, in those early Internet days of the 1990s, was totally new, and is still game-changing today.
The site, known as arXiv (pronounced “archive,” and long since decamped to the more wholesome address “arXiv.org” and to the stewardship of the Cornell University Library), is a vast repository of scientific preprints, articles that haven’t yet gone through the peer-review process or aren’t intended for publication in refereed journals. (Papers can also appear, often in revised form, after they have been published elsewhere.) As of July 2016, there were more than a million papers on arXiv, leaning heavily toward the hardest of the hard sciences: math, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, and above all, physics.
