Paul Ginsparg is a physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico USA. In August 1991, he developed the world's first electronic pre-print archive. Originally dedicated to papers in Ginsparg's own field (high-energy theoretical physics), the archive grew rapidly, attracting over 1000 users after a few months, and more than 3800 after several years. It was quickly extended to cover other areas of physics, and even other disciplines. Today it regularly processes between 1000 and 2000 electronic transactions per hour. Ginsparg himself remains very active in debates about the prospects and problems of electronic scientific publishing; in February 1996 he delivered a paper on the subject at an international conference sponsored by UNESCO, where he was interviewed by National Public Radio.

• Paul Ginsparg, "First Steps Towards Electronic Research Communication" , 8 Computers in Physics 390 (1994)
• Gary Taubes, "Peer Review in Cyberspace", 266 Science 967 (1994)