viXra log

2012 was a good year for viXra so this is a good moment to provide some statistics.

This blog passed the 1 million view mark in December which is not bad considering the low posting rate and the length of time it has been running. Thank you all for your support.

Apart from the blog, the main part of viXra is the pre-print archive which we started in 2009 for scientists and mathematicians who experienced problems submitting to other archives such as arXiv. Since then it has gone from strength to strength as shown in this plots of paper upload and download counts. We now have over 4000 pre-prints online.

Uploads include papers from sciprint.org which was a similar archive that ran from 2007 until 2009 when viXra began in July 2009. The download stats have been filtered to remove indexing robots and multiple downloads of the same paper from the same IP address.

As you can see we had a record number of uploads in 2012 and downloads have been doubling year-on-year. This year by popular request we also started showing download statistics for individual papers with counts backdated from out logs. These can be viewed on the abstract pages. Our rival arXiv only provides a long list of excuses why they don’t provide a similar feature.

For those not familiar with viXra and those who don’t get what it is about, here are some bullet points:

• viXra was created in 2009 for scientists who have issues submitting to other preprint repositories such as arXiv
• It is run by its administrators independently of any organisation.
• All submissions are free and unconditional. The site is funded by adverts (we no longer accept donations but thanks to all the past donors)
• It is viXra policy to accept all submissions of scientific research.
• We very occasionally reject submissions which contain personal attacks, adult material, too much repetition, copyright violations etc., but never because we disagree with the content.
• We only accept works of science and mathematics. If you have works of literature, art, politics etc, there are other places to publish them.
• Acceptance of papers into viXra does  not indicate any kind of endorsement or bestow any credibility or lack of credibility.
• The sole purpose of viXra is to provide open access to scientific works with permanent links for reference and time-stamped records of version changes to allow for verification of priority.
• viXra is not a peer-reviewed journal and as a mater of policy the administrators refuse all requests for feedback on submitted work.
• Authors retain copyright and can also submit papers to journals for peer-review.
• Each abstract page has a comment feature that anyone can use to provide feedback. Very few comments are deleted and never just because they are critical.
• Most authors who submit to viXra are independent researchers who cannot submit to arXiv because of their endorsement policy that makes it impossible to submit if you do not have academic contacts willing to vouch for you. Potential arXiv endorsers are often unwilling to help outsiders because the arXiv threatens to remove their endorsement rights if they endorse work deemed inappropriate by the arXiv moderators.
• viXra also contains work from people who are not independent of academic institutions. Some of them have found that they have problems with arXiv administrators who often move research that they don’t like to generic categories (e.g. general physics and general maths) In these categories you cannot normally cross-post to other categories and many indexing sites ignore them. The purpose of these categories seem to be to make unpopular research hard to find.
• Despite the open censorship of scientific research most academics support the arXiv endorsement and moderation policies and believe that it only filters out research of no scientific value.
• Although a significant number of papers in viXra are of low quality there are also many papers that have been accepted in peer-reviewed journals (estimated at 15% in one independent survey)
• Our comparison of essays by viXra authors submitted to the 2012 FQXi essay contest which were independently rated, showed that the distribution of scores was similar to the overall distribution from all authors of which about a third were professional scientists who submit to arXiv.
• Most papers that go against mainstream science are indeed as crazy as they seem, but there are numerous cases in the history of science where work was heavily criticized at first but later turned out to be right. viXra provides a place where any controversial work can be recorded and made available no matter where else it is rejected from. Even if such cases are very rare viXra would provide a service of value to science in this way.
• Science does not just progress in giant revolutionary steps and viXra also contains many ordinary works of everyday science that find it hard to get published or accepted into other repositories.
• Even research which contains many errors can nevertheless contain useful insights too. A good example from history was the work of Georg Ohm which was based on a very poor understanding of theoretical physics. Nevertheless it also contained a report of careful experiments that established Ohm’s law. Even papers that are seen to have many errors are worth keeping publically available in case they also have valuable ideas.
• Even if many papers on viXra turn out to have little scientific value, at viXra we believe that everyone should be encouraged to think for themselves and be given the opportunity to learn by their mistakes. It is also the case that you can never predict what crazy idea may inspire someone else to think of something else of real value.
• viXra is not “a way round peer-review” which is an important part of scientific evaluation. However, some scientists now agree that peer-review and publication should be formally separated. Traditional peer-review is often seen as flawed because of the role of publishing houses often motived by business interests. despite much discussion scientists and mathematicians have so far failed to implement a viable alternative to peer-review controlled by journals.
• One other way to access the value of papers over time is by looking at citations. Sadly viXra is now censored by all services that count citations such as Google Scholar, InspireHEP, CiteSeer etc., so it is impossible to evaluate viXra papers this way unless they are also published elsewhere.
• Despite the opposition from institutional science, we at viXra are encouraged by the support from our authors and will allow future historians to be our judge.

I am saddened to hear of the passing of Ray Munroe on who died on March 11th. Many readers of viXra Log will know of him through his web presence and his love of physics.  Last year his FQXi essay which ended in 27th place, a very respectable result for an independent researcher. He had worked professionally as a physicist studying cosmic rays and liked to be known as Dr Cosmic Ray. His last comments here were left just a month ago when he said “I’m excited to be living during such ground-breaking times.” His obituary can be read here.

Our condolences to his family, we will miss him too.

This is just an admin note for submissions of e-prints to the viXra archive. I am happy to say that there is now a system of web-based submission forms that authors can use to send us their articles for upload.

This system should free up the administrators (mainly me) to give us more time for other things. It will also mean less errors and more control for submitters. We will still honour submissions and other requests sent by email for a little while but please expect the form submissions to be dealt with usually within 24 hours, while e-mail submissions could take a week or longer.

viXra is two years old. Happy birthday viXra!

Today is the turn of viXra.org to pass an important milestone with over 2000 papers now in the e-print archive. The total has been added since it started a little less than two years ago. When I started on this project I did not imagine that so many people would make use of the service, so I would like to take this opportunity to thank the 600 authors who have supported us by submitting their work. This is also a good moment to thank Huping Hu and Jonathan Dickau who have kindly provided mirror servers for the site and they have helped out with submission administration to keep the service running at times when I am away. Their backup and support gives me confidence to say that viXra.org will survive as a long-term repository. I am also very grateful to those who have made generous donations to help cover the costs of running the server.

Despite the unqualified success of viXra.org I still get a sense that there are a lot more people out there who could benefit from using viXra. Some of them simply don’t know about it so this blog is one thing I do to publicize its existence. viXra.org is primarily here for scientists who do not have access to a qualified endorser for arXiv.org, usually because they are non-professionals working independently of any academic institution. Many of them have left professional research to follow a different carear but retain an interest and continue their research in their spare time. Of course viXra welcomes submissions from anyone and we do even get some contributions from people with .edu adresses along with the occassional highschool student and unqualified amateurs who like to think for themselves. To encourage more of these people to join in, here are a couple of answers to some of the questions people ask.

Does submission to viXra.org give you as much exposure as other archives such as arXiv.org?

It would be a plain lie to say that viXra is as well known or as well browsed as arXiv, yet the stats indicate that papers on viXra get just as many hits as they do on arXiv. Let’s look at the numbers. According to the arXiv usage stats they typically get something like 800,000 web connections each day. From the logs of viXra.org our corresponding figure is around 4000 per day, just 0.5 percent of the arXiv number. But of course we have a lot less papers. ArXiv have reached about 6000 new papers per month while viXra receives just 80 per month, or about 1.3% of their numbers, so relative to new papers submitted arXiv is getting about 2.5 times as many hits as viXra. Then again, arXiv has been around a lot longer and many accesses come from searches on its back-catalog. arXiv has 680,000 papers compared to viXra’s total of 2000 which is just 0.3% . So relative to the total archive we actually get 60% more hits than they do. Real usage is a mixture of looking at old and new papers so within the uncertainties of this crude analysis I think it is fair to say that a paper submitted to viXra gets a similar number of hits as one on arXiv.

How can this be? In fact most hits do not come from people browsing new submissions. They come from people who search on Google and other serach engines for keywords of interest to them. Since viXra is just as well indexed on Google as arXiv is, it actually gets just as many hits per paper.

Will submission to viXra.org damage your credibility because it is full of “crackpots” who cannot make it into arXiv.org?

It is really important to understand that it is not the purpose of an e-print archive to give you or your work credibility. Such recognition comes only from other sources such as acceptance in a peer-reviewed journal, use or citations of your work, or emperical verification of any predictions and the occasional Nobel Prize. All that you get from an archive such as viXra.org or arXiv.org is a longterm repository and a fixed link to your work so that people can find it and make links to it that will stay in place. It also provides independently verified timestamps so that others can check who reported any idea first in questions of priority.

Other scientists find papers in an archive mostly by searching on Google or by being referred from somewhere else. Once they find it they are not bothered about where it is. If they are sufficiently interested in the subject to have come across it they will be qualified to judge it on its own merits.

As to the accusation that vixra.org is full of crank papers, I would be a fool to claim that the work of non-professionals who do not have access to arXiv.org is going to be of the same qualify as the work of professionals who do, at least on average. But there are plenty of people who know their subject and have interesting work to publish who nevertheless do not have access to a qualified endorser as required by arXiv. Conversely, access to such an endorser does not mean someone’s work is good either. There are good papers on viXra.org just as there are bad ones on arXiv.org.

On a lighter note, enjoy this video, (warning: bad words!)