Cornell University Library, one of the leading academic research libraries in the US, is broadening the funding base for its online scientific repository, arXiv. Nearly 600,000 e-prints - research articles published online in physics, mathematics, statistics, computer science and related disciplines - now reside in arXiv, which claims to be an open information source for hundreds of thousands of scientific researchers.
arXiv will remain free for readers and submitters, but the Library has established a voluntary, collaborative business model to engage institutions that benefit most from arXiv. The 200 institutions that use arXiv most heavily account for more than 75 percent of institutional downloads. Cornell is now asking these institutions for financial support in the form of annual contributions. Most of the top 25 institutions have already committed to helping arXiv. Institutions that have already pledged support include California Institute of Technology; University of California, Berkeley, University of Cambridge (UK), CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research (Switzerland), CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France), Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Max Planck Society (Germany), among others.
The proposed funding model is viewed as a short-term strategy, and the Library is actively seeking input on a long-term solution. Currently, Cornell University Library supports the operating costs of arXiv, which are comparable to the costs of the university's collection budget for physics and astronomy. As one of the most influential innovations in scholarly communications since the advent of the Internet, arXiv's original dissemination model represented the first significant means to provide expedited access to scientific research well ahead of formal publication.
Researchers upload their own articles to arXiv, and they are usually made available to the public the next day. arXiv, founded by physics professor Paul Ginsparg, has about 400,000 users and serves more than 2.5 million article downloads per month.
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