arXiv

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arXiv is a preprint archive, serving up unreviewed papers in "Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics." It is the standard way to quickly get the word out (and stake out credit) in physics, particularly particle physics.

Anyone can upload a paper to arXiv, leading to the expected seas of green ink. Fortunately, papers for most topic categories require at least one other person to endorse them and the moderators are quite experienced in dealing with cranks, and so the unfiltered topic categories ("general physics," "general mathematics") are pretty much "abandon brain all ye who enter here."

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[edit] viXra

In defence of the spirit of free science and enquiry, a competitor, viXra, was 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."[1] Given some of the lunacy available on arXiv, we'd like you to just pause for a moment and contemplate what sort of content viXra accumulates (spoiler alert: Lots of Electric Universe crankery and occasional Global warming denialism, also you can find many proofs of famous math conjectures, notably the Riemann hypothesis and the Goldbach conjecture. Sadly, no serious mathematician gives them a damn).

The scientific world is mostly amused, insofar as it takes any notice at all.[2][3][4][5] The founder claims some papers of value that made it to peer-reviewed publication, though.[6]

viXra also features blog-style comments for each abstract, which are a delight even by the standards of the bottom half of the Internet.[7]

[edit] snarXiv

The other alternative to arXiv's oppressive and hidebound strictures, the snarXiv[8] generates abstracts of papers that damn well should exist.[9] Play arXiv vs snarXiv and see how well you can avoid self-Sokaling!

[edit] Ruining the joke

arXiv is pronounced as archive; In Greek, the capital character for Chi (ki) is the letter that became X (ex) in the Latin/Roman alphabet.

[edit] External links

[edit] Footnotes

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