viXra is an electronic
e-print
In academic publishing, an eprint or e-print is a digital version of a research document (usually a journal article, but could also be a thesis, conference paper, book chapter, or a book) that is accessible online, usually as green open access, w ...
archive known for unorthodox and
fringe science
Fringe science refers to ideas whose attributes include being highly speculative or relying on premises already refuted. Fringe science theories are often advanced by persons who have no traditional academic science background, or by researchers ...
.
It was set up by
independent
Independent or Independents may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Artist groups
* Independents (artist group), a group of modernist painters based in the New Hope, Pennsylvania, area of the United States during the early 1930s
* Independ ...
physicist Philip Gibbs as an alternative to the dominant
arXiv
arXiv (pronounced "archive"—the X represents the Greek letter chi ⟨χ⟩) is an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints (known as e-prints) approved for posting after moderation, but not peer review. It consists of ...
service operated by
Cornell University
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...
. Its name comes from arXiv spelled backwards.
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.
[What’s arXiv spelled backwards? A new place to publish]
. ''Nature News Blog''. 16 July 2009. The e-prints on viXra are grouped into seven broad categories: physics, mathematics, computational science, biology, chemistry, humanities, and other areas.
Anyone may post anything on viXra, though house rules do prohibit "vulgar, libellous, plagiaristic or dangerously misleading" content.
As a result, the site has a reputation among physicists for hosting "material of no interest". Physicist
Gerard 't Hooft
Gerardus (Gerard) 't Hooft (; born July 5, 1946) 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 th ...
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".
Gibbs originally started the archive to cater to researchers who believed that their preprints had been unfairly rejected or reclassified by the arXiv moderators.
As of 2013, it had over 4000 preprints, and in Dec 2020, the number had grown to 36,321. A 2020 study of preprint servers found that as of September of that year, viXra hosted 440 preprints about
COVID-19
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by a virus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. The disease quickly ...
.
viXra uses the same article numbering schema as arXiv: yymm.iiiii, where y stands for last two digits of the year, m stands for the month, and i stands for a sequential index among articles sent during the month.
See also
*
List of preprint repositories
This is a list of preprint repositories.
List
See also
* List of academic journals by preprint policy This is a list of Academic publishing, publishers of academic journals by their submission policies regarding the use of preprints prior t ...
References
External links
*
*
Eprint archives
Online archives of the United States
Fringe science
{{website-stub