Crosspost: Joanne Cohn and the email list that led to arXiv

Written by Toni Feder for Physics Today

A strong sense of community led an early-career string theorist to share preprints in a scientifically competitive environment.

Dr. Joanne Cohn shown here during a recent trip to the beach. Credit: Martin White

Before there was arXiv, there was Joanne Cohn. In the late 1980s, she was a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, working in the heady, fast-paced field of string theory. She started an informal exchange of string theory manuscripts that eventually became the arXiv preprint server, which has since revolutionized the way scientists share ideas and announce findings.

This past summer, arXiv marked its 30th birthday. According to its website, it receives some 16,000 manuscripts each month, and more than 1.97 million papers have been submitted to date. About 30 million manuscripts are downloaded monthly.

Today, Cohn is a research scientist in theoretical cosmology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Read about Dr. Cohn's preprint-sharing system in her own words at:

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.4.20211108a/full/