This feeling turned to awe when I realized that Lubos was still an undergraduate. Mr. Motl is a striking example of how the archive is changing physics. Founded 10 years ago by a Los Alamos particle theorist, Dr. Paul Ginsparg, the archive at first drew interest largely within the United States, but it now attracts some two million visits a week, more than two-thirds of them from institutions abroad. With 35,000 new paper submissions expected in 2001 alone, the archive provides a front-row view of the hottest developments in a given field of research. Besides spreading new ideas and concepts, he added, the archive has encouraged multinational collaboration.
Geopolitical boundaries are invisible to the Internet.
About half the visitors are scientists who connect directly to the main site in Los Alamos, and the other half are those who use one of 16 sites around the world where the archive has been duplicated to speed connections. Scientists may post their work at any stage, even before it has been reviewed by their peers. Scientists generally replace early drafts with edited versions if a paper is published in a peer-reviewed journal. Dr. S. Peter Rosen, associate director for high-energy and nuclear physics in the Energy Department's office of science, said he had expected participation in the archive from scientists at major research centers outside the United States, especially where close cultural ties to this country already exist. Indeed, the difficulty of receiving paper journals promptly from the United States and other Western countries makes the Los Alamos archive indispensable for scientists in Iran, said Dr. Farhad Ardalan, head of the physics department at the Institute for Theoretical Physics and Mathematics and a professor at Sharif University, both in Tehran.