#25 Paul Ginsparg: The godfather of open access publishing

#AskDifferent

Preprints have been circulated in the physics community since the early 1950s but mostly among well-established professors. Physicist Paul Ginsparg, who received the inaugural Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research in the Individiual Award category, set out to democratize access to scientific results. Today, his preprint server arXiv accommodates a broad array of fields — and has made scientific progress more efficient and fairer. In this episode, he reflects on his motivation to create arXiv.org back in 1991, the ways it has changed and continues to change scientific processes today, and the fact that freely shared scientific knowledge can encourage young people to become scientists.