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- Zhixiong: the National Science Library (Beijing) has put together a working group (arXiv Service Group). This group is composed of librarians from several different institutions. One goal for the year is to raise awareness of arXiv among researchers (especially in non-physics areas). They would appreciate any promotional material arXiv could provide.
- Zhixiong: another goal of the Service Group is to conduct a survey to discover how arXiv is used by researchers and students, the level of knowledge about arXiv, and what problems researchers may have with using arXiv. This may be of general value to arXiv.
Molly, Eva, Jim, Jaron, Oya:
- Highlights from subscriber news: we have invoiced 135 institutions who pledged as part of the campaign. We will invoice both new institutions that have appeared on the top 50 (and top 200), as well as institutions that did not respond.
- We discussed feasibility for a new class of membership for society publishers. This category in arXiv could give them a new identify and a new way of communicating scholarship, particularly as relates to society publisher communication with faculty. Faculty members like the arXiv project and are happy to contribute to contribute it, but faculty are still quite conservative with regards to wanting access to print documents -- in other words, they run the gamet of supporting open access as well as the old publishing guard. For instance, if we get AMS to be a sponsor, they might be to promote arXiv and connect with it and researchers in new and beneficial ways.
- Publishers recognize the value of arXiv to their members; AAS, for instance, would be very supportive. Other international societies would be likely to support arXiv. How are scientists in China (for instance) using arXiv?
- How can we encourage institutions to become sponsors? We have the acknowledgement banner and we agree that "Libraries" should be added to "University/College/etc." to indicate that arXiv support is library-funded (nearly all). Many do not know that their institutional LIBRARY supports arXiv.
- There is some discussion about the look of arXiv; for frequent users of the system the interface is clean and navigable; for others who are new the front-end seems rather outdated, particularly in terms of a search and discovery interface. Unless someone has an understanding of how arXiv works, they may 1) not "understand" that arXiv.org is the main arXiv page, and 2) this setup may deter NEW USERS OR SUPPORTERS -- thought not the old guard of scientists -- from using or supporting arXiv if they find it difficult to navigate. How can we facilitate a process to provide user feedback, and new usability options, to the arXiv SAB and other stakeholders? For instance, Eva described a faculty member who encourages his students to deposit McS thesis to arXiv; could these students be a user-testing/feedback group for us, as potentially new scientists?
- Is there a growing market for data tools to make freely available data searchable and usable?
- Is data a major challenge for arXiv (due to metadata, storage, etc)? Does arXiv intend to hold on to the data/ancillary material forever, along with the articles? Purdue is going for track (sp?) certification for CRL (Purdue research repository); one of the issues to address is how long will the institution preserve the data, esp. as much of it will deteriorate over time. In addition, researchers might not want to reuse any of the data (despite government mandates prompting them to do so) given all of the variables in each data set.
- While research data is somewhat marginal for arXiv -- which might be natural as the biggest user groups are HEP and astrophysics, both disciplines that typically pay attention to data management and run big data repositories. On the other hand, the more formal sciences like math have different needs and may not be as well-organized.
- arXiv partnered with Data Conservancy (Johns Hopkins) for a pilot, where arXiv acted in a front-end for DC for researchers to deposit data; the conclusion was that most of the data sets were small, and were the kind of ancillary files that are already found in arXiv.
- How will OSTP affect arXiv? arXiv has been approached by at least one publisher to discuss "partnership" in order to fulfill the repository requirement for the project. Compliance issues will reside with the publisher.
- In Europe, Open Science is becoming reality because European Union is supporting it. For instance, OpenAIRE project, https://www.openaire.eu has garned a lot of attention. EU requires everyone who has received Framework 7 EU funding (and that is quite a lot of people) to publish the resulting papers OA in institutional repositories. What makes this different from previous similar attempts is that EU has real bureaucratic resources to check whether {*}this requirement is fulfilled, and is able withdraw funding. *What does this mean, in practical terms? For example, at the University of Helsinki this means we must make our research database TUHAT compatible with OpenAIRE technical specificatons so that they can harvest the relevant metadata. In an ideal case, our institutional repository should include full text OA documents, but we are accepting links to arXiv instead. EU not stopping at OA pubs, data is next to be OA. In Finland they are working on the next step, an accompanying metadata catalog. More info: http://www.csc.fi/sivut/tta/national-reseach-data-project
ACTION ITEMS:
1. Discuss and investigate a new class of membership for scientific and scholarly societies;
2. Work with SAB and other MAB members to discuss usability studies for the arXiv interface (landing page);
3. Monitor the discussion about OSTP to see if they will impact arXiv's core mission.
Financial Planning
- We would like to diversity of revenue sources in order to raise additional funds to allow us to expand arXiv's staffing (especially the current minimal IT staffing configuration), lowering the current tier structure to encourage more organizations to become members, and support R&D projects. What are your suggestions? One of the ideas we would like to discuss is adding a Give button on arXiv home page to invite donations from users (examples). What are the pros and cons of this idea?
- The purpose of the arXiv reserve fund is to support unexpected expenses to ensure a sound business model. Currently, arXiv has a reserve fund of approximately $100,000 that accumulated during 2010-2011 due to unexpected staff vacancies and other savings (2012 expenses have not been factored in yet). The 2013-2017 budget projections assume that we will be able to add $50,000-$100,000 per year to the reserve funds. We need to develop policies about how contingency funds will be used and how the account will be structured (for instance, funds needed for closing the business versus development funds - also a part of the reserve funds to create an endowment & the interest can be used for reducing membership fees). Also, we need to determine at what point of reserve fund accumulation (total reserve balance) we will consider to lower the annual membership fees.
- The current annual institutional fees are in the $1,500-$3,000 range, which may be high for some developing countries or institutions that are lower in the use ranking (below 200). Shall we add a lower fee to encourage these institutions to support arXiv?
- Some of our members feel that it makes sense to increase the annual fee for the top users as the current model does not appear fair (see the usage chart). What do you think? Should we add a higher top tier pricing for the organizations that are listed high in the use list?
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