ArXiv founder Paul Ginsparg discusses the pioneering twenty-year-old disciplinary archive in "ArXiv at 20."
Here's an excerpt:
On arXiv, we have seen some of the unintended effects of an entire global research community ingesting the same information from the same interface on a daily basis. The order in which new preprint submissions are displayed in the daily alert, if only for a single day, strongly affects the readership on that day and leaves a measurable trace in the citation record fully six years later.