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- 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?
- Philip sees the potential to increase the fees, because arXiv is still a great value at current fees. He also asked how the disciplinary coverage in arXiv has changed since physics was the main user group; are we paying close enough attention to disciplinary differences?
arXiv 2013 Budget & Pledge Summary (May'13): arXiv snapshot_May2013.pdf
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Conference Call: May 21, 10:30am EDT
Meeting Notes:
Action items:
- arXiv will arrange a follow-up meeting with publishers to discuss developments since the Sept. 2011 meeting. Many publishers have expressed an interest and willingness to be part of arXiv's future plans and this call will be an opportunity to discuss new initiatives, like open access mandates;
- Develop a subgroup to coordinate feedback from publisher surveys' to provide information and feedback about new collaborations
- Develop a sub-group across MAB and SAB to draft and coordinate another feedback survey
Interest in developing surveys:Scientists. Members across multiple MAB subgroups are interested in talking to scientists' about their use of arXiv. One suggestion is to survey non-physicists about arXiv in an effort to better understand their obstacles. We all agree it is important not to conflate "scientists" into one lump group because of both disciplinary differences and use-case scenarios (i.e. some scientist are users of arXiv, others are readers of arXiv, submitters to arXiv, etc.)
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- Interest in developing surveys:Scientists. Members across multiple MAB subgroups are interested in talking to scientists' about their use of arXiv. One suggestion is to survey non-physicists about arXiv in an effort to better understand their obstacles. We all agree it is important not to conflate "scientists" into one lump group because of both disciplinary differences and use-case scenarios (i.e. some scientist are users of arXiv, others are readers of arXiv, submitters to arXiv, etc.)
- A publisher survey before the next publisher-conference call may help develop the agenda and get a sense of emerging priorities, ideas that are no longer relevant, etc.
- How are new fields of study introduced into arXiv? It's largely been a practical question in terms of analyzing submission data. Before new fields are considered for arXIv, both MAB and SAB will need to be on board.
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- OSTP/open access: *We discussed the OSTP mandate and arXiv's role/position in this newest U.S. open access initative. Given our role as an international rapid, pre-print service, we wish to remain true to our core mission; at the same time, we understand that publishers and agencies might look to arXiv as a repository solution. We are currently working with one publisher to investigate this idea, but our goal in working with any publisher to to investigate and potentially develop a framework that is generalizable across multiple publishers/societies. We agree a process/solution cannot be U.S.-centric and will would require significant changes in metadata and possibly compliance. For many, arXiv + scholarly journals= green open access, and this combination may be attractive across other related-fields. Does arXiv wish to collaborate with paid journals for "green open access" in order to provide an alternative to gold open access?
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- What's the current outlook for the system architecture? *Currently, we are pursuing a modular approach to update the system. Our priority is the moderation system, but we will refocus architecture discussion for next year and beyond as it relates to metadata, cross-linkin, DOI, etc.
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- Supplementary material: *We have concluded our trial with Data Conservancy. We learned that very little of material being deposited was "large" data. It was mostly small data sets similar to the kind that arXiv has always accepted. We will start assigning EZIDs to data sets.
- Research data has really changed so at the call we will need to spend time reviewing the developments in this area.
- Author identification is still a priority. Simeon Warner is on the board of ORCID. We learned that at LANL, if a researcher is presenting at a conference/publishing, they now get an internal ID to attach to the preprint and deposit to repository. LANL is interested in DOI/author verification issues.
- Statistics: aggregate data versus alt-metrics. The idea of knowing what articles are used during the lifecycle of research is interesting. It is our policy not to provide any download counts for individual article, even to authors of the article. That door is already opened on individual article metrics.
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Action items:
- arXiv will arrange a follow-up meeting with publishers to discuss developments since the Sept. 2011 meeting. Many publishers have expressed an interest and willingness to be part of arXiv's future plans and this call will be an opportunity to discuss new initiatives, like open access mandates;
- Develop a subgroup to coordinate feedback from publisher surveys' to provide information and feedback about new collaborations
- Develop a sub-group across MAB and SAB to draft and coordinate another feedback survey
Research and Development Agenda
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