Large-Scale Open Access For Research And Outreach

Paul Ginsparg is being honored as a Champion of Change for the vision he has demonstrated and for his commitment to open science.

In 1991, before the WorldWideWeb, before the general population was even aware of the internet, physicists had already begun to share pre-publication versions of their articles via email.  As a research staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory, I was concerned that this private sharing unintentionally gave privileged access to more established researchers. To help rectify the situation, I set up a centralized automated repository and alerting system, making cutting-edge full-text articles accessible to anyone with internet access.   For the initial group of high energy theoretical physicists, the system had the immediate positive effect of democratizing the exchange of information within an entire global research community.