Cornell Tech has received over $7 million in combined funding from NASA and Schmidt Sciences to overhaul arXiv, the influential open-access research repository that now hosts more than 2.8 million scientific papers.
The investment will accelerate arXiv’s migration to cloud infrastructure, upgrade its ageing codebase and develop new recommendation tools to help researchers better discover relevant preprints.
Greg Morrisett, Jack and Rilla Neafsey, dean and vice provost at Cornell Tech, said the support ensures the platform can scale with the growing needs of the global research community. He called the funding a critical investment in arXiv’s long-term sustainability.
Ramin Zabih, arXiv’s executive director and a professor of computer science at Cornell Tech, noted that the repository is in the middle of a major technology transformation.
The grants, he said, will allow the team to complete the migration without service disruptions, while also experimenting with improved discovery and access tools.
Schmidt Sciences’ contribution will help arXiv expand its engineering capacity and finish the modernisation push.
NASA’s grant will support research into building fairer and more effective search and recommendation capabilities, as well as extending arXiv’s reach into fields aligned with the agency’s priorities, including planetary science.
James Ricci, director of science systems at Schmidt Sciences, said the organisation is eager to help arXiv move to scalable cloud infrastructure and meet rising global demand, calling the platform a vital driver of open science.
Founded in 1991 by physicist Paul Ginsparg, arXiv has grown into a widely used repository for disciplines spanning physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, finance and more.
Beyond the latest grants, the platform continues to be supported by the Simons Foundation, academic libraries, universities, professional societies and individual donors.
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