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- Cornell University provides a subsidy of $170,000 and makes an in-kind contribution of all indirect costs, which currently represents 37% of total operating expenses.
- The Simons Foundation contributes $100,000 per year in recognition of CUL's stewardship of arXiv. In addition, the Foundation matches $300,000 per year of the funds generated through arXiv membership fees.
- Each member institution pledges a five-year funding commitment to support arXiv based on institutional usage ranking (the annual fees are set in six tiers from $1,000-$4,400).
- To diversity diversify funding sources, we also rely on grant funds from foundations and governmental agencies to sponsor new development projects and implement online fundraising campaigns to encourage giving by the arXiv's international user community.
We remain grateful for the support from the Simons Foundation that has encouraged long-term community support by lowering arXiv membership fees and making participation affordable to a broader range of institutions. This model aims to ensure that the ultimate responsibility for sustaining arXiv remains with the research communities and institutions that benefit from the service most directly. Finding new, sustainable funding avenues to support current operations and upgrades of Classic arXiv's aging code has been an important effort for the arXiv team. Following a $450,000 grant from the Sloan Foundation in 2017, arXiv received $322,000 from the Heising-Simons Foundation to contribute to the arXiv-NG initiative. As reflected in the 2019 budget, the arXiv team is taking an integrated approach to consider the current operational system (Classic arXiv) and the next-gen system as a unified program. This approach is essential as we recruit and retain staff who will need to be conversant with the old and new systems, and transitioning from one to the other. We are strategically expanding the core arXiv development team to bring new skills to the arXiv-NG project, while continuing to provide excellent support and maintenance of the production arXiv system.
Key Accomplishments and Plans for 2019
Since we started the arXiv sustainability initiative in 2010, an integral part of our work has been assessing the services, technologies, standards, and policies that constitute arXiv. Here are some of our key accomplishments from 2018 to illustrate the range of issues we have been trying to tackle. Please see the 2018 Roadmap for a full account of our work.
Since we started the arXiv sustainability initiative in 2010, an integral part of our work has been assessing the services, technologies, standards, and policies that constitute arXiv. Here are some of our key accomplishments from 2018 to illustrate the range of issues we have been trying to tackle. Please see the 2018 Roadmap for a full account of our work.
- Our development team has improved various search, browse, and accounts features as we reimplement, test, refine and continue to improve the arXiv platform. We also made significant progress reimplementing the submission user interface, API, and backend services with a new data architecture. Wherever possible, new software components are developed in public repositories and released under permissive open source licenses. Information about software releases can be found here.
- We continue to improve facilities for administrators and moderators in order to streamline their workflows, and to improve clarity and transparency of arXiv communications. During 2018, the arXiv team made improvements to the auto-endorsement system and created a moderator policy page. They also identified areas to improve help pages on user facing policies.
- We refined our overall process for prioritization and getting things done in arXiv-NG and continued to develop and implement methods for soliciting user input and feedback, particularly to guide arXiv-NG decision making, including a protocol for remote usability testing, and applied it to the development of a new moderation interface.
- Last July, arXiv added two new subject areas: Theoretical Economics and General Economics
- Our user support team updated our internal policies and practices documentation, filling in areas where policies have evolved. Our goal is to provide clear, consistent, established arXiv policies. Going forward we will be expanding and reorganizing policy documentation for moderators and submitters.
- With funding from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), we conducted a pilot to investigate the role of arXiv Labs in facilitating lightweight and more sustainable path for collaboration with Cornell Computing and Information Science through a reference extraction and linking project.
- We explored the implications of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and started to work with the Cornell experts in supporting related questions and requests from arXiv users.
- We continued to assess and refine arXiv’s organizational and governance model and held an annual meeting for the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) and Member Advisory Board (MAB) to discuss IT development priorities, financial state, moderation tools and policies, and fundraising strategies.
- As we witness the proliferation of preprint services, we collaborated with bioRxiv and ASAPbio in hosting a meeting of nascent preprint services to start discussing collaboration opportunities.
- We strengthened the daily oversight of arXiv and the arXiv NG development process of the arXiv team with a modified organizational structure and welcomed new team members. We also established a new external Technology Advisory Group to advise the IT leads.
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