Inside ArXiv

Summary

On the library’s side, some people thought Ginsparg was too hands-on. Others said he wasn’t patient enough. A “good lower-level manager,” according to someone long involved with arXiv, “but his sense of management didn’t scale.” For most of the 2000s, arXiv couldn’t hold on to more than a few developers.There are two paths for pioneers of computing. One is a life of board seats, keynote speeches, and lucrative consulting gigs. The other is the path of the practitioner who remains hands-on, still writing and reviewing code. It’s clear where Ginsparg stands—and how anathema the other path is to him. As he put it to me, “Larry Summers spending one day a week consulting for some hedge fund—it’s just unseemly.”But overstaying one’s welcome also risks unseemliness. By the mid-2000s, as the web matured, arXiv—in the words of its current program director, Stephanie Orphan—got “bigger than all of us.” A creationist physicist sued it for rejecting papers on creationist cosmology. Various other mini-scandals arose, including a plagiarism one, and some users complained that the moderators—volunteers who are experts in their respective fields—held too much power. In 2009, Philip Gibbs, an independent physicist, even created viXra (arXiv spelled backward), a more or less unregulated Wild West where papers on quantum-physico-homeopathy can find their readership, for anyone eager to learn why pi is a lie.Then there was the problem of managing arXiv’s massive code base. Although Ginsparg was a capable programmer, he wasn’t a software professional adhering to industry norms like maintainability and testing. Much like constructing a building without proper structural supports or routine safety checks, his methods allowed for quick initial progress but later caused delays and complications. Unrepentant, Ginsparg often went behind the library’s back to check the code for errors. The staff saw this as an affront, accusing him of micromanaging and sowing distrust.In 2011, arXiv’s 20th ann...