News from arXiv…

I saw recently an announcement that arXiv – which recently became a standalone nonprofit organization – now hosts more than three million articles. That message took me to a post on the arXiv blog from which I learnt that said blog is on WordPress which makes it possible to include embedded links from this WordPress blog, i.e.: arXiv now hosts over 3 million articles This in turn reminded me to answer a question that people sometimes ask about the Open Journal of Astrophysics, namely what would happen if arXiv went offline? Since OJAp is an arXiv-overlay journal this would appear to be fatal. We have been keeping duplicates of all the papers we publish, and associated metadata, in a local repository so that if arXiv went down we could reistate them fairly quickly. All we would need to do is alter the overlay to point to a different web address: there is no reason at all why the overlay idea can’t be adapted to other forms of repository. Recently, however, arXiv decided to do a similar…