Thursday, August 6, 2009

viXra.org: An Alternative Archive Of e-Prints In Science And Mathematics

ViXra.org is an e-print archive set up as an alternative to the popular arXiv.org service owned by Cornell University.


[http://vixra.org/]

It has been founded by scientists who find they are unable to submit their articles to arXiv.org because of Cornell University's policy of endorsements and moderation designed to filter out e-prints that they consider inappropriate.ViXra is an open repository for new scientific articles. It does not endorse e-prints accepted on its website, neither does it review them against criteria such as correctness or author's credentials.

Source

[http://vixra.org/]

Why viXra?

In 1991 the electronic e-print archive, now known as arXiv.org, was founded at Los Alamos National Laboritories. In the early days of the World Wide Web it was open to submissions from all scientific researchers, but gradually a policy of moderation was employed to block articles that the administrators considered unsuitable. In 2004 this was replaced by a system of endorsements to reduce the workload and place responsibility of moderation on the endorsers. The stated intention was to permit anybody from the scientific community to continue contributing. However many of us who had successfully submitted e-prints before then found that we were no longer able to. Even those with doctorates in physics and long histories of publication in scientific journals can no longer contribute to the arXiv unless they can find an endorser in a suitable research institution.

The policies of Cornell University who now control the arXiv are so strict that even when someone succeeds in finding an endorser their e-print may still be rejected or moved to the "physics" category of the arXiv where it is likely to get less attention. Those who endorse articles that Cornell find unsuitable are under threat of losing their right to endorse or even their own ability to submit e-prints. Given the harm this might cause to their careers it is no surprise that endorsers are very conservative when considering articles from people they do not know. [snip]

[snip]

It is inevitable that viXra will therefore contain e-prints that many scientists will consider clearly wrong and unscientific. However, it will also be a repository for new ideas that the scientific establishment is not currently willing to consider. Other perfectly conventional e-prints will be found here simply because the authors were not able to find a suitable endorser for the arXiv or because they prefer a more open system. It is our belief that anybody who considers themselves to have done scientific work should have the right to place it in an archive in order to communicate the idea to a wide public. They should also be allowed to stake their claim of priority in case the idea is recognised as important in the future.

[snip]

In part viXra.org is a parody of arXiv.org to highlight Cornell University's unacceptable censorship policy. It is also an experiment to see what kind of scientific work is being excluded by the arXiv. But most of all it is a serious and permanent e-print archive for scientific work. Unlike arXiv.org it is truly open to scientists from all walks of life.

Source

[http://vixra.org/why]

News Coverage

Fledgling site challenges arXiv server

[http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/39845]

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