Digital research repository arXiv to start new chapter as nonprofit | Cornell Chronicle

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It was born in northern New Mexico, the brainchild of then-Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist Paul Ginsparg, Ph.D. ’81, as a simple way for researchers to share their work with colleagues before it appeared in peer-reviewed journals.<br>When Ginsparg returned to Cornell as a professor in 2001, he brought the online research repository arXiv with him. And for 25 years it has remained at Cornell, where it has grown into a global clearinghouse for millions of research papers, accessible to anyone with an internet connection.<br>Now, arXiv embarks on its next chapter: a transition to an independent nonprofit. The move will enable faster technological development, greater organizational flexibility, expanded partnerships and long-term financial sustainability.<br>“This is something we’ve talked about for a long time,” said Greg Morrisett, the Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean of Cornell Tech, where arXiv is headquartered. “To make sure for the long run that it was going to be supported, well beyond a particular dean valuing it, we felt like it was a responsible thing to do.”

arXiv's explosive growth

Monthly cumulative totals from August 1991 through June 2026

arXiv began in August 1991 as a preprint server for high-energy physics and has since grown into a multidisciplinary repository for research across physics, mathematics, computer science, and more. As of June 2026, the cumulative submission count exceeds 3.08 million.

The move will become official July 1; arXiv headquarters will remain in Cornell Tech’s Tata Innovation Center. The search is on for an inaugural CEO as well as a board of directors.<br>“I laud the effort that Cornell has invested in arXiv for the past 25 years, enabling its growth,” said Ginsparg, professor of information science and physics in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, and in the College of Arts and Sciences. “I would like to ensure that the memory of that effort remains part of the permanent arXiv history.”<br>Since it started, arXiv has been a free service for researchers around the world to share their work with the community, and to see what their peers are doing without waiting for potentially lengthy peer-review processes, or paying for academic journal subscriptions.<br>Among the site’s users are scientists, both in the U.S. and abroad, for whom paywalls can be prohibitive. In a 2022 story marking arXiv’s 2 millionth submission, Tara Holm, professor of mathematics in the College of Arts and Sciences, noted the scale of arXiv’s global influence.<br>“These 2 million submissions represent 2 million opportunities for humanity to push forward the frontiers of our understanding,” she said. “arXiv has transformed mathematics.”<br>Making foundational research more accessible<br>Ramin Zabih, arXiv’s faculty director and professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and Cornell Bowers, said arXiv has had a key role in many disciplines.<br>A foundational high-energy physics paper, “The Large N Limit of Superconformal Field Theories and Supergravity,” from 1997, was introduced to the world on arXiv by its author, then-Harvard University professor Juan Maldacena, now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.<br>In 2002, when Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman solved the Poincaré conjecture, for which he won the $1 million Millennium Prize in 2010, he published the papers on arXiv instead of submitting them for formal peer review. And in computer science, the DeepSeek papers that substantially changed the AI landscape in 2025 were published on arXiv.<br>Material is not peer-reviewed by arXiv; a submission’s contents are the responsibility of the submitter but are subject to a moderation process that assesses the material’s topicality to the subject area, as well as its scholarly value.<br>Ginsparg said arXiv’s greatest attribute – aside from the fact that “it doesn’t have advertisements” – is how it facilitates “global low-barrier research, providing access to cutting-edge research, in principle, for anyone with an internet connection, a prime feature it has retained since 1991.”<br>He recalled that, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the...