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What is the value proposition of the arXiv Institutional Membership Program for libraries?

User feedback tells us that arXiv continues to be the most successful and prominent subject repository system serving the needs of scientists worldwide. A user survey was conducted in April 2016 to seek input from the global user community about the current services and future directions. We were heartened to receive 36,000 responses, representing arXiv’s diverse community. The prevailing message is that users are happy with the service as it currently stands. 95% of survey respondents said that they are very satisfied or satisfied with arXiv. Furthermore, 72% of respondents indicated that arXiv should focus on its main purpose, which is to quickly make available scientific papers, and this will be enough to sustain the value of arXiv in the future (see the survey findings

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As you assess the value proposition of supporting arXiv, please bear in mind that a Tier 2 contribution of $3,800 is roughly equivalent to the subscription cost of one highly ranked physics journal or one APC charge in a journal like Nature Communications (with an APC of $5,200), New Journal of Physics (with an APC of $2,080), Physical Review X (with an APC of $2,900), or Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics(with an annual subscription cost of $5,740). arXiv ranks #1 in the

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Ranking Web of

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Repositories  and arXiv sections rank as five of the top ten publications in

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Google Scholar’s Top Publications in Physics and Mathematics . Aside from the knowledge that you are part of a shared investment in a culturally embedded resource providing unambiguous value to a global network of scientific researchers, here are some other reasons we would like you to become members:

• Your membership fees are essential to garner the $300,000 per year matching funds from the Simons Foundation. These funds encourage long-term community support by keeping arXiv membership fees low, making participation affordable to a broader range of institutions.

• You will be able to participate in arXiv’s ongoing governance through the Member Advisory Board, which provides input for project prioritization, new service offerings, financial planning, use of discretionary funds, future technical developments, and policy decisions.

• You will have access to enhanced institutional use statistics.

• Each member library will receive  public acknowledgement of their  financial support  both on arXiv.org and locally to the institution via an IP-generated banner. We would like to expand our strategies to make sure that scientists are aware of the role of libraries in ensuring arXiv’s sustainability. Please send us your ideas to support@arxiv.org!  

• Greater integration with, and implementation of, Open Access scholarship as the arXiv team works closely with related and complementary initiatives such as SCOAP3,  Open Archives Initiative (OAI) , ORCiD, Center for Open Science, and Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR).

Have you considered basing the membership model on submissions instead of downloads?

One of the reasons for using download statistics as the basis of the arXiv tier model is the challenges associated with tracking submissions from a particular institution to arXiv. The author metadata arXiv collects is not sufficiently consistent to support systematic submission analysis. Manual analysis of a single month of submissions in 2013 indicated a similar ranking in submission- and download-based data. During the arXiv-NG initiative, arXiv expects to undertake metadata remediation to improve the authorship data for existing submissions (including full ORCID implementation). In the current version of arXiv, it would be difficult to support a reliable submission-based tier model. While we do require submitters to register their institutional affiliation when they register an account with us, and most submitters are authors in the papers they submit (though not necessarily first authors), the relationship between the submitter and the submission’s author metadata is still rather weak. We allow submitters to supply affiliation information in the author metadata, but it’s neither enforced nor widely used. This makes it especially difficult to report on the institutional affiliation of co-authors. In order to implement a submission-based tier model, we will need to expand arXiv’s data model to better integrate with ORCIDs to start. In some cases (like large collaborations), it would still be difficult to expect submitters to provide complete authorship and affiliation data; here it would be helpful have tools to extract this information from the full-text automatically.  

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What are the expenses and revenue sources for 2018–20222018–2022?

The draft budget factors in support only for the routine, daily arXiv operation. It does not include resources needed for significant improvements, emergency interventions (server failure), special projects, or research and innovation. This budget does not consider the nascent arXiv-NG initiative as the new development initiative needs to be supported by an additional fund raising effort. As we transition from Classic arXiv (current system) to arXiv-NG in approximately 2020, the annual expenses will need to be adjusted, taking into consideration the staffing needs of the new architecture.

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