Time was, teachers would tell students to turn off their cellphones in the classroom. Less so, now. Facebook, Twitter, and iTunes have not only invaded the classroom but have also become part of the class.
ArXiv.org, which emerged in 1991 from Cornell University in New York, was one of the earliest applications of academic social networking. An open-source Internet platform, designed to be used by researchers as a communication tool, it revolutionized the way scientists shared findings before official publication in journals.
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ArXiv.org, updated daily, allows free worldwide access and response to almost 600,000 online research papers in physics, mathematics, computer science and more, increasingly sidelining the role of traditional print journals.
“The scientific literature was always six months behind the current research,” Mr. Patil said, adding that journal articles now “are almost irrelevant, and many teachers don’t even bother writing them anymore.”
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