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- So far, CUL's sustainability planning efforts focused on arXiv's operational budget to support the core services and arXiv's strengths in order to stay mission-centric. How can we move beyond the current sustainability model that focuses on operations to a strategic plan for arXiv's further development and innovation? Beyond the 2013 Roadmap, we would like to set a 3-5 year strategic plan for arXiv (encompassing all aspects of arXiv including user support, IT, moderation, etc.). Do you recommend any strategies or tools in setting priorities and assessing collaboration models? Do you know of any successful models we can learn from? We also need to find additional funds but we want this goal to be driven by an agenda.
- Based on your knowledge of arXiv, its principles, and the repository ecology, do you have any recommended R&D areas that we should be focusing on?
- arXiv is approached on a regular basis by outside groups asking for advice or special services. Sometimes the assistance requested is minor, but often it would require devoting some amount of staff effort. We need guidelines for determining under what circumstances we will allocate resources in order to collaborate with an outside organization. We would like to develop a methodology to guide us make decisions about potential working collaborations with outside groups. Do you have any recommendations?
Members: Tommy, Mackenzie (Oya & Simeon from arXiv)
Conference Call: April 22, 11:30am EDT
Meeting Notes:
- Tommy presented six questions to consider: Ideas for improving the arXiv interface; adding new functions; who can submit to arXiv; considering a peer review function; information exchange between arXiv and local IRs; ORCID implementation.
- To identify an R&D agenda, Mackenzie suggests that we should think of a set of categories and then see what can be rolled into the operation and addressed in the short term and requires real R&D. Possible categories: Interface, author identity, infrastructure scalability, mining arXiv.
- Discussion of the OSTP OA mandate and questions about whether arXiv could be a fee-based submission venue to meet the mandate - what added value might make this worthwhile. Mackenzie stresses that what is needed is a system for getting credit when one deposits to an open access system. For instance, can a scientist only post on arXiv with a DOI and use this as an academic achievement in support of his/her tenure process (not requiring a peer-reviewed publication)? Can we build some article level metrics into arXiv? This is an R&D area for consideration.
- One idea to consider is positioning arXiv as a preservation system and the possibility of developing for-fee-services for journals wanting to archive on arXiv, or even whether we might charge depositors.
- Tommy wonders if arXiv should promote itself as a way to meet green OA mandates and if and how it will meet the requirements emerging in different countries (compliance issues).
- Mackenzie recommends that when we enter a new collaboration, we need to assess the costs and do not enter in a partnership without a clear benefit for arXiv - whether it is visibility or additional revenues. She wonders if we should work out ways to charge for our services.
- Mackenzie questions whether we can develop a set of mining tools and monetize by providing cost-recovery services (similar to the data mining tools HathiTrust Research Center is providing) We can avoid conflict with free open-access to corpus by still providing that free. Mackenzie suggests Sloan Foundation as a potential funding sources. Many research groups and publishers are interested in data mining tools.
- Oya asks about research data and arXiv - Mackenzie says that this supporting research data is a big issue and that we must be careful not to get distracted from our open access article mission. Possible collaboration with Dryad would be interesting.