arXiv in Chronicle of Higher Education

["Okerson, Ann" <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

January 21, 2010, 11:00 AM ET

Cornell Library Proposes New Model to Keep arXiv Going

By Jennifer Howard

Cornell University Library announced today that it wants the top 
institutional users of arXiv.org to help pay for the online 
scientific repository. 'Keeping an open-access resource like 
arXiv sustainable means not only covering its costs, but also 
continuing to enhance its value, and that kind of financial 
commitment is beyond a single institution's resources,' Oya 
Rieger, Cornell's associate university librarian for information 
technologies, said in a statement describing the new strategy.

The experiment is shaping up to be a test of how well multiple 
institutions can band together to support critical scholarly 
resources. For scientists in physics, mathematics, quantitative 
biology, statistics, computer science, and related fields, arXiv 
has become an indispensible clearinghouse for the latest 
research. The brainchild of a physics professor, Paul Ginsparg, 
the repository holds nearly 600,000 e-prints of research 
articles, many of which appear there before they make their way 
through the formal journal-publishing process.

It costs Cornell about $400,000 a year to maintain arXiv, 
according to Anne R. Kenney, university librarian at Cornell. The 
library's annual budget runs in the $40- to $50-million range. 
Some 200 institutions account for about 75 percent of the 
download traffic on arXiv, and it's that group that Cornell hopes 
will pony up first. The suggested contribution for the heaviest 
users is $4,000. Ms. Kenney says that most of the top 25 have 
said they will participate.

Calling arXiv 'a lifeline' for areas of the world with limited 
access to scholarly publishing resources, Ms. Kenney emphasized 
that arXiv will continue to be open access. Individual users will 
not be charged to submit or to review its contents.

One major user of arXiv's resources is the Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology. Ann J. Wolpert, director of libraries 
there, confirmed that MIT will answer the call for money, even 
though it comes at time when resources are tight. 'It's just not 
reasonable to think that one institution could carry that burden 
in perpetuity,' she said. 'The way Cornell has been approaching 
this is eminently sensible and fair.'

Ms. Kenney emphasized that the call for contibutions is a 
short-term fix that will buy time to look into longer-term 
solutions. 'It opens the door to seeing something like arXiv as 
being a public good worthy of support beyond one institution,' 
she said. That could lead to federal money or -- perhaps the 
best-case scenario -- an endowment.

MIT's Ms. Wolpert also sees the arXiv pitch as a harbinger of 
things to come. 'The call for support comes at a time when we're 
all looking for ways to sustain those shared resources that have 
become so critical to the academy these days,' she said. 'I think 
the library is looking to work with faculty in these key 
disciplines in our institutions for a longer-term, more 
sustainable, more integrated solution to the way scholars 
communicate.'

One critical concern for libraries is how to avoid paying for the 
same content in multiple versions. Could repositories like arXiv 
replace journals altogether? That's a delicate question to pose 
to a librarian.

Ms. Kenney said that one of arXiv's strengths has been how well 
it has coexisted with more-traditional publishing. 'I don't know 
what the future holds,' she said. 'There has been a critical role 
that formal publishing provides in terms of the vetting of 
materials. I can tell you that it has been gratifying to have a 
pretty healthy relationship between arXiv and the formal 
scholarly literature.'

Ms. Wolpert cautioned against taking a narrow, either-or view of 
publishing options in the Internet age. Research moves along a 
publishing continuum 'that is now managed in separate pieces, but 
that we hope with some thought and care and leadership from 
faculties and [scholarly] societies and libraries will become a 
more integrated system,' she said. It will be worth watching to 
see how much closer the arXiv experiment gets us to such a 
system.

Copyright 2010 The Chronicle of Higher Education

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