Re: ALPSP statement on BOAI

From: Arthur Smith <apsmith_at_APS.ORG>
Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2002 14:10:58 -0400

David Goodman wrote:
>
> The use of arXiv during March 2002 was 2.5 million connections to the
> main http://arXiv.org site, not counting mirror sites. That's a factor
> of 100:1.
> (By no means does everything in arXiv correspond in subject to Phys Rev
> D, but that factor should be compensated for by the mirrors.)

We've been over this before...

Those are not comparable numbers. I was talking about only full article
downloads, not searches, abstracts, tables of contents, etc, which give
multiplier factors of 10 or more if you want to compare a total number
of "connections". High energy physics is probably only about 1/5 of
what's at arxiv.org these days - cond-mat and astro-ph are very big.
Also hep-th, hep-ph and company let through about twice as many HEP
articles as we publish in Phys Rev D. And I doubt the mirrors (except
the original Los Alamos one) get more than 10% of the traffic unless
arXiv.org is deliberately redirecting it. We run a mirror at
aps.arXiv.org, and I know what the numbers are for it.

When you put it all together, our Phys Rev D is maybe a factor of 2
behind arXiv.org in downloads per "published" paper, and we're
comparable to arXiv.org or have higher numbers for the other areas of
physics. It's not anywhere near a factor of 100:1. And it's been
reasonably stable this way for the last 3-4 years.

                Arthur

PS [Sorry Marty, I couldn't resist - I'll be quiet now :-)]
Received on Mon Apr 22 2002 - 19:37:31 BST

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