ViXra

Last updated
viXra
Type of site
e-print archive
Available inEnglish
Owner Scientific God Inc.
Founder(s) Philip Gibbs
URL viXra.org
CommercialNo
Launched2009
Current statusOnline

viXra is an electronic e-print archive known for unorthodox and fringe science. [1] [2] [3] It was set up by independent physicist Philip Gibbs as an alternative to the dominant arXiv service operated by Cornell University. Its name comes from arXiv spelled backwards. [4] [5]

Contents

Description

Although dominated by physics and mathematics submissions, viXra aims to cover topics across the whole scientific community. It accepts submissions without requiring authors to have an academic affiliation and without any threshold for quality. [4] The e-prints on viXra are grouped into seven broad categories: physics, mathematics, computational science, biology, chemistry, humanities, and other areas. [6] Anyone may post anything on viXra, though house rules do prohibit "vulgar, libellous, plagiaristic or dangerously misleading" content. [3] As a result, the site has a reputation among physicists for hosting "material of no interest". [7] Physicist Gerard 't Hooft writes, "When a paper is published in viXra, it is usually a sign that it is not likely to contain acceptable results. It may, but the odds against that are considerable". [2]

Gibbs originally started the archive to cater to researchers who believed that their preprints had been unfairly rejected or reclassified by the arXiv moderators. [8] As of 2013, it had over 4000 preprints, [9] and in Dec 2020, the number had grown to 36,321. [10] A 2020 study of preprint servers found that as of September of that year, viXra hosted 440 preprints about COVID-19. [11]

See also

Related Research Articles

The holographic principle is a property of string theories and a supposed property of quantum gravity that states that the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a lower-dimensional boundary to the region — such as a light-like boundary like a gravitational horizon. First proposed by Gerard 't Hooft, it was given a precise string theoretic interpretation by Leonard Susskind, who combined his ideas with previous ones of 't Hooft and Charles Thorn. Leonard Susskind said, “The three-dimensional world of ordinary experience––the universe filled with galaxies, stars, planets, houses, boulders, and people––is a hologram, an image of reality coded on a distant two-dimensional surface." As pointed out by Raphael Bousso, Thorn observed in 1978 that string theory admits a lower-dimensional description in which gravity emerges from it in what would now be called a holographic way. The prime example of holography is the AdS/CFT correspondence.

arXiv Online archive of e-preprints

arXiv is an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints approved for posting after moderation, but not peer review. It consists of scientific papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, astronomy, electrical engineering, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, mathematical finance and economics, which can be accessed online. In many fields of mathematics and physics, almost all scientific papers are self-archived on the arXiv repository before publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Some publishers also grant permission for authors to archive the peer-reviewed postprint. Begun on August 14, 1991, arXiv.org passed the half-million-article milestone on October 3, 2008, had hit a million by the end of 2014 and two million by the end of 2021. As of April 2021, the submission rate is about 16,000 articles per month.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Ginsparg</span> American physicist

Paul Henry Ginsparg is an American physicist. He developed the arXiv.org e-print archive.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Preprint</span> Academic paper prior to journal publication

In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset version available free, before or after a paper is published in a journal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anomaly (physics)</span> Asymmetry of classical and quantum action

In quantum physics an anomaly or quantum anomaly is the failure of a symmetry of a theory's classical action to be a symmetry of any regularization of the full quantum theory. In classical physics, a classical anomaly is the failure of a symmetry to be restored in the limit in which the symmetry-breaking parameter goes to zero. Perhaps the first known anomaly was the dissipative anomaly in turbulence: time-reversibility remains broken at the limit of vanishing viscosity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gerard 't Hooft</span> Dutch theoretical physicist

Gerardus (Gerard) 't Hooft is a Dutch theoretical physicist and professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics with his thesis advisor Martinus J. G. Veltman "for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions".

In theoretical physics, the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence is a conjectured relationship between two kinds of physical theories. On one side are anti-de Sitter spaces (AdS) which are used in theories of quantum gravity, formulated in terms of string theory or M-theory. On the other side of the correspondence are conformal field theories (CFT) which are quantum field theories, including theories similar to the Yang–Mills theories that describe elementary particles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leonard Susskind</span> American physicist (born 1940)

Leonard Susskind is an American physicist, who is a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University, and founding director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. His research interests include string theory, quantum field theory, quantum statistical mechanics and quantum cosmology. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an associate member of the faculty of Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and a distinguished professor of the Korea Institute for Advanced Study.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robbert Dijkgraaf</span> Dutch politician, mathematical physicist and string theorist

Robertus Henricus "Robbert" Dijkgraaf FRSE is a Dutch theoretical physicist, mathematician and string theorist, and the current Minister of Education, Culture and Science in the Netherlands. From July 2012 until his inauguration as minister in January 2022, he had been the director and Leon Levy professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and a tenured professor at the University of Amsterdam.

Alexander Markovich Polyakov is a Russian theoretical physicist, formerly at the Landau Institute in Moscow and, since 1989, at Princeton University, where he is the Joseph Henry Professor of Physics Emeritus.

In theoretical physics, the anti-de Sitter/quantum chromodynamics correspondence is a goal to describe quantum chromodynamics (QCD) in terms of a dual gravitational theory, following the principles of the AdS/CFT correspondence in a setup where the quantum field theory is not a conformal field theory.

Superdeterminism describes the set of local hidden-variable theories consistent with the results of experiments derived from Bell's theorem which include a local correlation between the measurement settings and the state being measured. Superdeterministic theories are not interpretations of quantum mechanics, but deeper theories which reproduce the predictions of quantum mechanics on average, for which a few toy models have been proposed. In such theories, "the probabilities of quantum theory then become no more mysterious than those used in classical statistical mechanics." Postulating that systems being measured are correlated with the settings of the measurements apparatus, is a violation of what Bell described as a "vital assumption" of his theorem. A hidden-variables theory which is superdeterministic can thus fulfill Bell's notion of local causality and still violate the inequalities derived from Bell's theorem. Unlike Bell test § Loopholes, superdeterministic theories cannot be excluded by Bell-type experiments as ultimately the past light cones of all measurement settings and measured states overlap at the Big Bang implying a necessarily shared causal past and thus the possibility of local causal dependence.

Einstein–Cartan–Evans theory or ECE theory was an attempted unified theory of physics proposed by the Welsh chemist and physicist Myron Wyn Evans, which claimed to unify general relativity, quantum mechanics and electromagnetism. The hypothesis was largely published in the journal Foundations of Physics Letters between 2003 and 2005. Several of Evans's central claims were later shown to be mathematically incorrect and, in 2008, the new editor of Foundations of Physics, Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft, published an editorial note effectively retracting the journal's support for the hypothesis.

Black hole complementarity is a conjectured solution to the black hole information paradox, proposed by Leonard Susskind, Larus Thorlacius, and Gerard 't Hooft.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gérard Ben Arous</span> French mathematician

Gérard Ben Arous is a French mathematician, specializing in stochastic analysis and its applications to mathematical physics. He served as the director of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University from 2011 to 2016.

bioRxiv Preprint service

bioRxiv is an open access preprint repository for the biological sciences co-founded by John Inglis and Richard Sever in November 2013. It is hosted by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">EarthArXiv</span>

EarthArXiv is both a preprint server and a volunteer community devoted to open scholarly communication. As a preprint server, EarthArXiv publishes articles from all subdomains of Earth Science and related domains of planetary science. These publications are versions of scholarly papers that precede publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals. EarthArXiv is not itself a journal and does not evaluate the scientific quality of a paper. Instead, EarthArXiv serves as a platform for free hosting and rapid dissemination of scientific results. The EarthArXiv platform assigns each submission a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), therefore assigning provenance and making it citable in other scholarly works. EarthArXiv's mission is to promote open access, share open access and preprint resources, and participate in shared governance of the preprint server and its policies. EarthArXiv was launched on October 23, 2017.

AfricArXiv is an open-access repository for preprints of academic publications which are either about Africa or by African scientists. The platform was established in 2018. It was established to make preprint servers more available in various fields and regions. Its establishment happen during trends to provide more digital services to support science in Africa.

References

  1. Collins, Harry; Bartlett, Andrew; Reyes-Galindo, Luis (July–August 2017). "Demarcating fringe science for policy". Perspectives on Science. 25 (4): 411–438. doi:10.1162/POSC_a_00248. S2CID   57566881.
  2. 1 2 't Hooft, Gerard (2017-11-15). "The importance of recognising fringe science" (PDF). Institute for Theoretical Physics, Utrecht University. Retrieved 2017-11-28.
  3. 1 2 Becker, Kate (2016-10-27). "What Counts as Science?". Nautilus . Retrieved 2017-11-28.
  4. 1 2 "What’s arXiv spelled backwards? A new place to publish". Nature News Blog. 16 July 2009.
  5. Delfanti, Alessandro (2020). "Chapter 20, Fake archives: The search for openness in scholarly communication platforms". In Biagioli, Mario; Lippman, Alexandra (eds.). Gaming the Metrics: Misconduct and Manipulation in Academic Research. MIT Press. pp. 261–269. ISBN   978-0-262-53793-3.
  6. "ViXra.org open e-print archive". viXra.org. Retrieved 22 August 2011.
  7. Reyes-Galindo, Luis (2016-04-29). "Automating the Horae: Boundary-work in the age of computers" (PDF). Social Studies of Science. 46 (4): 586–606. arXiv: 1603.03824 . Bibcode:2016arXiv160303824R. doi:10.1177/0306312716642317. PMID   28948871. S2CID   2001597.
  8. Cartwright, Jon (15 July 2009). "Fledgling site challenges arXiv server". Physics World . 22 (8): 9. Bibcode:2009PhyW...22h...9C. doi:10.1088/2058-7058/22/08/14.
  9. Gibbs, Philip E. (2013). "A Good Year for viXra". Prespacetime Journal. 4 (1): 87–90.
  10. Official site (front page)
  11. Nabavi Nouri, Shayan; Cohen, Yosef A.; Madhavan, Mahesh V.; Slomka, Piotr J.; Iskandrian, Ami E.; Einstein, Andrew J. (February 2021). "Preprint manuscripts and servers in the era of coronavirus disease 2019". Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice. 27 (1): 16–21. doi: 10.1111/jep.13498 . ISSN   1356-1294. PMID   33094906.