Cornell’s arXiv Research Repository Secures $10M for Upgrades

Cornell Tech has announced a total of more than $10 million in gifts and grants from the Simons Foundation and the National Science Foundation, respectively, to support arXiv, a free distribution service and open-access archive for scholarly articles.

The funding will allow the growing repository with more than 2 million articles to migrate to the cloud and modernize its code to ensure reliability, fault tolerance and accessibility for researchers.

“I am deeply grateful for this tremendous support from both the Simons Foundation and the NSF,” said Greg Morrisett, the Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech. “This investment ensures that the arXiv service will continue to scale, to serve an even broader constituency, and better serve the arXiv scientific community.”

“This generous funding from the Simons Foundation and the National Science Foundation will allow arXiv to expand its critical growth in the scientific community, where it allows thousands of researchers to freely disseminate, exchange and explore their findings,” said Ramin Zabih, arXiv faculty director and professor of computer science at Cornell Tech. “By modernizing the code base and transitioning to the cloud, we are strengthening arXiv’s infrastructure and ensuring that it will continue to be a source of innovation in the sharing of scholarly publications. We are grateful to the Simons Foundation and the NSF for their support and for sharing in our vision for arXiv.”

The next stage of arXiv’s development will include hiring multiple software developers to support the modernization effort. In parallel, faculty members in the Department of Computer Science, with funding provided by the NSF, will develop new search and recommendation techniques that can be tested and deployed on arXiv’s large and active user community, supported by state of the art privacy guarantees. In addition, arXiv will provide substantially better access to the visually impaired by producing HTML as well as PDF versions of its content.

“The arXiv has been a critical piece of research infrastructure for decades, and just as important, part of the foundation of open science that the world relies on every day,” said David Spergel, president of the Simons Foundation. “Through our partner Cornell Tech, the foundation is proud to continue its investment in arXiv. This gift will help modernize the arXiv and ensure its sustainability for the community of scientists and mathematicians whose contributions have made it what it is.”

arXiv was founded in 1991 by then-Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist Paul Ginsparg, Ph.D. ’81, prior to his return to Cornell in 2001. The repository is now maintained and operated by Cornell Tech, and serves researchers in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.

“The Simons Foundation has provided essential behind-the-scenes support for arXiv since 2011, as a natural partner in support of the research enterprise,” said Ginsparg, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, and of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. “The additional support to facilitate a transition to long-term sustainability should permit arXiv to enhance through an even longer period the transformative effects it has had on research communication over the past three decades.”

In addition to the Simons Foundation’s ongoing support, arXiv is supported by academic and research libraries, universities, research organizations, professional societies and individual donors.