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Paul Ginsparg to Recieve Paul Evan Peters Award at
April C
I'm delighted to share this news with the CNI community.
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
21 Dupont Circle
Washington, DC 20036
202-296-5098
http://www.cni.org
For Release: February
22, 2006
arXiv Founder Paul Ginsparg Named
Recipient of Paul Evan Peters Award
Paul Ginsparg, physicist
and Internet scholarly communications pioneer, is the latest recipient
of the Paul Evan Peters Award, announced today by the Coalition for
Networked Information (CNI), the Association of Research Libraries
(ARL), and EDUCAUSE. The award will be presented on April 3,
2006 at the CNI Membership Meeting in Arlington, VA, where Ginsparg
will deliver the Paul Peters Award lecture at the opening plenary.
A professor of physics, computing and information science at Cornell
University, Ginsparg has distinguished himself as the visionary behind
arXiv (http://arxiv.org), an Internet e-print archive for articles in
the sciences, which allows scholars to circulate and comment on
research prior to publication in traditional peer-reviewed journals,
thereby significantly reducing the amount of time it takes for an
article to be available to researchers. Started in 1991 as a
service for preprints in physics, arXiv eventually expanded to include
mathematics, computer science and quantitative biology. Today,
the resource boasts open access to over 350,000 articles.
"Paul Ginsparg's accomplishments as a theoretical physicist, alone,
distinguish him as a superb scholar, but his innovations in scientific
publication, for which the Paul Evan Peters award honors him, truly
places him in the annals of history as a transformative figure who has
changed the landscape of scholarly communication forever," remarked
Ronald Larsen, Dean of the School of Information Sciences at the
University of Pittsburgh and a member of the award search committee.
"This is a richly deserved award," Larsen continued, "that honors
the legacy of Paul Evan Peters."
Commenting on how Ginsparg's brainchild has revolutionized science
publishing, in the October 2005 issue of Sky & Telescope,
author Richard Tresch Fienberg reports that papers published in more
than a dozen major astronomy journals are twice as likely to be cited
by other researchers if they have also appeared on arXiv. He
observes, "Clearly, professional astronomers are gravitating toward
[arXiv] as their primary - perhaps even exclusive - reference
source." Expressing this view directly as part of the 2001
UNESCO Expert Conference Electronic Publishing in Science, Ginsparg
wrote, "The essential question for 'Electronic Publishing in
Science' is how our scientific research communications infrastructure
should be reconfigured to take maximal advantage of newly evolving
electronic resources."
The award - named for CNI's founding director - recognizes Ginsparg as
creative and innovative, capable of taking a fresh view of
conventional models of exchange and collaboration, which, eventually,
led to a groundbreaking approach to scholarly communication.
"Dr. Ginsparg has helped to usher in an extraordinary new era in
scholarly communication. I am delighted that he has been
selected to receive the Paul Evan Peters Award - his contributions
clearly illustrate the spirit of this award, " said Duane Webster,
ARL Executive Director.
In 2002, Ginsparg was named a fellow of the John D. and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation. Upon announcing the award, the foundation
stated that, "Ginsparg has deliberately transformed the way
physics gets done - challenging conventional standards for review and
communication of research and thereby changing the speed and mode of
dissemination of scientific advances."
Commenting on the impact Ginsparg's work has
had on scholarly communication, CNI Executive Director Clifford Lynch
said, "Paul's work has shown how technology can fundamentally
change the patterns of flow and the pace of scientific communication
and has challenged scholarly disciplines to reconsider their
practices."
Ginsparg joins previous award recipients Brewster Kahle (2004), Vinton Cerf (2002) and Tim Berners-Lee (2000).
Three nonprofit organizations, the Coalition for Networked
Information, the Association of Research Libraries, and EDUCAUSE,
sponsor the Paul Evan Peters Award, which was established with
additional funding from Microsoft and Xerox Corporations. The
award honors the memory and accomplishments of Paul Evan Peters
(1947-1996). Peters was a visionary and a coalition builder in
higher education and the world of scholarly communication. He
led CNI from its founding in 1990 with informed insight, exuberant
direction, eloquence, and awareness of the needs of its varied
constituencies of librarians, technologists, publishers, and others in
the digital world.
CNI is a coalition of some 200 member institutions dedicated to
supporting the transformative promise of networked information
technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the
enrichment of intellectual productivity. ARL's membership
includes the leading research libraries in North America. Its
mission is to shape and influence forces affecting the future of
research libraries in the process of scholarly communication,
promoting equitable access to and effective use of recorded knowledge
in support of teaching, research, scholarship, and community service.
EDUCAUSE is an association of nearly 1,900 colleges, universities, and
education organizations whose mission is to advance higher education
by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.
For more information contact CNI Communications Coordinator Diane
Goldenberg-Hart at diane@cni.org.
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