A three-year $883,000 grant from the National Science Foundation is expected to convert Cornell's e-print arXiv of scientific papers from a simple database to an interaction site where authors, articles, databases and readers talk to each other to help users identify a work's main concepts, see research reports in context and easily find related work.
"It shouldn't be a one-way channel," said Paul Ginsparg, professor of physics and information science, who heads the new project funded by the grant with federal stimulus money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
The arXiv (pronounced "archive") currently contains close to 600,000 papers in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics, with some 5,000 new papers submitted each month. Researchers submit their work as "preprints" before formal publication. Such preprints used to be passed around by hand before Ginsparg launched the arXiv in 1991 at the Los Alamos National Laboratory; he brought it to Cornell in 2001, where it is now hosted by Cornell Library.
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