https://vixra.org/why https://vixra.org/info.html >viXra Info > Throughout history, science, mathematics and other areas of humanity such as religion and spirituality have been advanced by people from a wide range of backgrounds - Intellectuals, priests, rich noblemen, patent clerks and autodidacts. Only in the past century did research become overwhelmingly concentrated into the ivory towers of academia. With the scientific literature locked away in the thick volumes of journals held in university libraries it became impossible for anyone outside the establishment to follow the quickening pace of new ideas. > In the early 1990s, this began to change with the advent of the internet and the world wide web where research papers previously distributed between universities as preprints were transferred to websites openly accessible to anyone with an internet connection at work or at home. Thousands of PhD students each year learn the methods of research in science but leave to apply their skills in industry rather than continuing their academic career. Now they find that they have access to new results in the fields of science that interested them as students. Aided by new technologies such as powerful home computers they can often continue in their spare time to advance the research they left behind. > And it is not just those with PhDs who can join this revolution. Many people in today’s world are sufficiently smart, well-educated and motivated to develop their own ideas and write them up as scientific papers. While governments pass new legislation to ensure that publicly funded research is made available to all through free and open access on the internet, another important side of scientific research remains closed to outsiders. Publishing in academic journals is a drawn-out process where people without institutional affiliations are subjected to extra scrutiny by their peers inside universities. Publishing in open access journals can also be far too costly for those without funding. Mainstream researchers have the ability to deposit their new papers in eprint repositories for rapid dissemination but submission is often closed to outsiders unless they can obtain an endorsement from someone inside the system. This blockage delays publication leaving independent researchers open to the risk of losing priority or even being plagiarised if someone else publishes the idea first. In many cases the obstacles to publication are just too great and the work never gets seen or it may be published in fly-by-night hobby journals that disappear before the new idea becomes relevant. > viXra.org is an open access repository for preprint papers from all areas of science, mathematics and other scholarly topics. It was founded in 2009 to help overcome problems increasingly experienced by independent researchers who wish to disseminate their original research. It has also proved useful to people in less well funded institutions such as those in the third world and academics whose ideas fall outside the accepted mainstream. > The purpose of viXra is to ensure that all researchers and scholars, both formally trained and self-taught, have the opportunity to place their work in a repository without much delay so that they are independently time-stamped and kept available at a fixed URL. There is no charge for this service. ...