arXiv moving from Cornell servers to Google Cloud

> If GCP is helping, stay tuned for a blog post from google some time around the completion of the migration with a title like "Reaffirming our commitment to science" or something similarly self affirming.

"Google pays to run an enormous intellectual resource in exchange for a self-congratulatory blogpost" seems like a perfectly acceptable outcome for society here.

> If GCP is helping, stay tuned for a blog post from google some time around the completion of the migration with a title like "Reaffirming our commitment to science" or something similarly self affirming.

This is an odd criticism. If a company is footing the bill, it can’t even talk about it to gain some publicity/good will?

https://info.arxiv.org/about/supporters.html

  Our Supporters
  ...
  Gold Sponsors
  Google, Inc (USA)

"Reaffirming our commitment to science" or something similarly self affirming.

While I understand that something is more genuine if done in secret, it doesn't stop being a real commitment to science just because you make a pr post about it.

If company X contributes to Y open source foundation, that's real and they get to claim clout, nobody cares about a post anyways.

Some sort of federated preprint protocol where anyone could stand up a node and clone the existing data would be ideal. The current centralized operator then becomes "just" a curator (and competing curators are easy to set up).

Wow, this is a great article! (other archive link - https://archive.is/XVCi7 )

I didn't realize arXiV was started in 1991. And then I wondered why I had never heard of it while I was at Cornell from 1997-2001. Apparently it only assumed the arXiV name in 1999.

I like that it was a bunch of shell scripts :)

Long before arXiv became critical infrastructure for scientific research, it was a collection of shell scripts running on Ginsparg’s NeXT machine.

Interesting connections:

As an undergrad at Harvard, he was classmates with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer; his older brother was a graduate student at Stanford studying with Terry Winograd, an AI pioneer.

On the move to the web in the early 90's:

He also occasionally consulted with a programmer at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) named Tim Berners-Lee

And then there was a 1994 move to Perl, and 2022 move to Python ...

Although my favorite/primary language is Python, I can't help but wonder if "rewrite in Python" is mainly a social issue ... i.e. maybe they don't know how to hire Perl programmers and move to the cloud. I guess rewrites are often an incomplete transmission of knowledge about the codebase.

its not a nonprofit (cornell, its a university) but they do accept donations

https://info.arxiv.org/about/donate.html

It looks like the links are broken to the software engineer and DevOps open roles.

Is it related with policies from the US administration?

That's true. I recently had to move a VM from gcp to hetzner because gcp would silently drop all packets to some countries, Iran included. And a Stack overflow question was the easiest way to learn about it, not gcp docs.

Is it not ideal to block Iran?

No, they announced that they are starting this project back in June 2023 [0], though it is good to see Cornell suing the administration for the second time, first was back in February. And as an alum, who also had relatives up at syracuse, i appreciate the snark from syracuse.com [1] calling Cornell a 'central NY college' heh

0. https://blog.arxiv.org/2023/06/ 1. https://www.syracuse.com/news/2025/04/central-ny-college-sue...

On the contrary, I'd expect Google to be much more proficient at blocking requests based on various factors. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if recaptcha made an appearance.

By all rights arxiv should be moving towards decentralization as opposed to being picked up by one of the largest centralized players.