arXiv medium as a prerequisite of open access as an important component of open science

Paul Ginsparg recognized the need for central storage of scientific papers and in August 1991 he created a central repository mailbox stored at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) accessible from any computer. Additional modes of access were soon added: FTP in 1991, Gopher in 1992, and the World Wide Web in 1993. LANL archive began as a physics archive and later expanded to include astronomy, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics. In 2001 the archive was moved to Cornell University and named arXiv.org. In a sense the open-access nature of the arXiv pre-prints can be considered as a prerequisite of the Budapest Open Access Initiative in February 2002, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing in June 2003, and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in October 2003.

The “arXiv culture” stimulates the researcher’s ability to share a pre-print of an article before its publication in a journal. The arXiv deposition opens the peer-review process to the entire scientific community with no delay. A remarkable consequence of this peer review is the potential for experts publishing litigation-related work in what are called “predatory journals”.

The Open Access opens the road to the Open Science – a term/concept that describes the entire process of conducting and communicating science – sharing FAIR data, methods, codes, open practices to allow critical scrutiny, so that knowledge can be validated and used by the whole community. Open science (“open research”) includes not only open access to content and information but could comprise citizen science projects, scholarly communication networks, open source software and open lab notebooks.

How to combine the peer-review process typical for scientific journals and how to protect the intellectual property rights in the realm of openness are Open Questions to be discussed in the talk.