Online science archive founder Paul Ginsparg to receive prestigious Internet award

Paul Ginsparg, Cornell professor of physics and information science, Cornell Ph.D. in physics (1981) and a pioneer in Internet scientific communications, has been named winner of the Paul Evan Peters Award from the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and EDUCAUSE.

The award will be presented April 3 at the CNI membership meeting in Arlington, Va., where Ginsparg will deliver the Paul Evan Peters Award Lecture at the opening plenary.

Previous winners of the award are Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web and founder and director of the World Wide Web Consortium; Vinton Gray Cerf, who co-created the TCP/IP protocols and system architecture on which the Internet runs; and Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. Ginsparg joins this illustrious group as creator of arXiv, an Internet e-print archive for articles in the sciences that has transformed scientific communication.

"What a delight!" said Robert Richardson, Cornell professor of physics and vice provost for research. "Paul Ginsparg's honor is well-deserved due to his contribution to modern publications through his genius in the creation of arXiv."

The arXiv allows scholars to circulate and comment on research prior to publication in peer-reviewed journals and significantly reduces the time for an article to become publicly available. Ginsparg created the arXiv in 1991 while working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, primarily as a way to "level the playing field" for physicists located outside the United States, particularly in developing countries. Many were receiving prepublication versions of scientific papers many months after their American and European counterparts, and often they were unable to afford the scientific journals at all. Eventually the arXiv became a shining example of how the Internet can make scholarly publishing simpler, faster and far less expensive, compared with publication in printed journals.

"Although this project was initiated two or three generations ago in Internet time, it's still difficult to project precisely what form it will take on the 10-year timescale," Ginsparg said. "We're trying to evolve one model component of what we hope will become some overall seamless infrastructure for scholarly research communication and continue to remain in step with rapid technological changes."

Ginsparg brought the arXiv with him from Los Alamos when he joined the Cornell faculty in 2001. It now includes mathematics, computer science and quantitative biology and is managed by Cornell University Library, leaving Ginsparg more time to pursue theoretical physics research. Ginsparg noted that the library affiliation guarantees the arXiv's long-term stability.

CNI is a coalition of some 200 member institutions dedicated to supporting networked information technology in scholarly communication and intellectual productivity. ARL's membership includes the leading research libraries in North America. EDUCAUSE is an association of nearly 1,900 colleges, universities and education organizations interested in advancing higher education through information technology.

The three organizations established the Paul Evan Peters Award with additional funding from Microsoft and Xerox corporations to honor the memory and accomplishments of Paul Evan Peters (1947-1996), founding director of CNI.

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