Civilization / Foundations of Civilization

arXiv Preprint Server

Paul Ginsparg's arXiv puts physics papers online before peer review; preprints become the first stop for research news.

Started in August 1991 at Los Alamos as an e-mail server for high-energy physics, arXiv now hosts millions of papers in physics, maths and computer science. It showed that free, immediate circulation of results works and paved the way for open access.