Releasing Into the Wild

It's always exciting to put out a paper for the world to see.   In high energy physics we can do it very quickly through the arXiv (http://arxiv.org) which was created back in 1991 as a preprint server.  Journals are an intrinsically slow process.  You submit a paper, an editor sends it out for review, then a referee writes a response, the authors make subtle changes (perhaps iterate the last two steps a few times), the paper is accepted, the journal typesets the article, the proofs are sent back to the authors, typos are found, the proofs are corrected and the article is put in for printing.  If all goes smoothly, this is 4 months from when you submitted the paper to when it appears in print.  In most circumstances it's closer to 6 or 8 months -- an eternity to communicate ideas.  To avoid this delay, physicists used to send around packets of preprints to different groups (by mail!).  This was pretty effective, every week a packet of preprints would arrive and people would spend the day reading new articles.    Of course this created a pretty terribly hierarchical system of information availability. Are you going to send off your preprints to the small universities?   More importantly, to every institution in China, India and Russia? Thus a preprint server was made shortly after the invention of the WWW.   This allowed people to submit preprints of papers and let physicists around the world download them for free.  A great democratization of information.    These days at 5pm Pacific Time, papers are released to world Sunday through Thursday.  About a hundred papers a day are released in physics.   In terms of propriety, whoever gets to the arXiv first, wins.