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- 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frequent users of the system the interface is clean and navigable; for others who are new the front-end seems rather outdated, particularly in terms of a search and discovery interface.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 the new OSTP mandate 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.
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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.
- 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?
- 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.
- Supplementary 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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