Technical
Items are listed in approximate priority order and may be adjusted based on ongoing discussions with the Scientific and Member Advisory Boards. The focus of work in 2016 is improvement of facilities for administrators and moderators in order to streamline their workflows, and to improve clarity and transparency of arXiv communications. A number of other tasks address legacy software issues.
Allow moderators to recategorize articles via the web interface - We want to encourage moderator use of the web interface to streamline their workflow and to avoid unnecessary reliance on admins as intermediaries. Moderators should be able to make specific category change recommendations via the web interface that result in alerts to other appropriate moderators.
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Update, reorganize and better document the TeX system - TeX is currently a central component of our article processing, approximately 85% of submissions are TeX or PDFTeX source. We need to update our TeX installation, improving our packaging so that it can more easily be deployed and updated, better documenting our installation, and increasing experience within the current development team. We need to update the TeX binaries to the current version of TeX Live (currently TeX Live 2011, should use 2014), update our set of style files (last update was 2011), and also update our ghostscript installation.
The updated TeX system will skip TeX Live 2014 favor of TeX Live 2016. The integration with TeX Live 2016 is currently undergoing "burn-in" testing against recent submissions in our development environment. Testing is going well, and the latest patches from TeX Live 2016 have been applied. The anticipated release date of this update is OctoberJanuary 2017.
- ARXIVDEV-1561
- status: work in progressscheduled for deployment January 2017
Migrate functions away from old PHP/Tapir codebase and into Perl/Catalyst - Complete replacement of old PHP/Tapir code with more maintainable and better integrated Perl/Catalyst code.
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Improve ORCID author identifier support - Deprecate the local arXiv author ids in favor of ORCID iDs throughout the arXiv user interface, add ORCID iDs to arXiv API.
As part of work to deprecate the local author ids and support ORCID iDs as the primary form of author identification, the ORCID form now simply displays the page (or provide atom / json) without requiring that an arXiv author id exist and without a redirect to an arXiv author id page. ORCID iDs still need to be added to the arXiv API.
- ARXIVDEV-3133
- status: not starteddeferred to 2017 and/or arXiv NG
Use HTTPS for all of web interface - The web is rapidly moving toward secure communication (using HTTPS, HTTP over SSL) and all arXiv accesses should occur over HTTPS. All existing HTTP URLs should still resolve but they should do this via a redirect to the equivalent HTTPS URL.
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Refine process for addition of overlap notices notices - Following the September 2015 recommendation of the Scientific Advisory Board, we will implement a process to put submissions on hold when overlap with other articles is detected by Paul Ginsparg's system. This will provide authors an opportunity to respond to warnings before overlap notices are added.
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Consolidate web presence at the main site - The arXiv mirror network was very useful in the early days of arXiv and web. However, geographic locality of servers is much less useful now than it was when the mirror network was established, the mirrors are little used, and maintaining support for mirrors impedes development of new features on arXiv. We will discontinue the remaining six arXiv mirrors and improve capacity of the main site network. A presence at Los Alamos National Laboratory will be retained to support support http://xxx.lanl.gov/ URLs URLs and we will investigate support for TeX processing for A4 paper.
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Subject category aliasing for cs/math/stat - There are three subject category merges (aliases) requested in order to better represent subject areas that span major discipline boundaries. Some of these require extra work because there are pre-0704 (old identifiers, see see http://arxiv.org/help/arxiv_identifier) submissions where the primary category is becoming an alias and thus the historical primary archive to identifier prefix correspondence will be broken. In the past aliases have been made on an ad-hoc basis and without the need to change existing primary archive designations. We should instead work out and document procedures for such changes. Includes work to create tools for the bulk re-categorization of submissions affected by this and later merges.
- ARXIVDEV-1179
- status: not starteddeferred to 2017 and/or arXiv NG
Streamline moderator and admin interactions - Work with arXiv moderators to streamline their interactions with the system and with arXiv administrators. Will include better handling of warnings from classification and overlap detection systems, better presentation of discussions of issues and more facilities directly in the moderator web interface.
This has been partially achieved by by ARXIVDEV-2503 but but more work is needed, especially in the area of adding more facilities directly in the moderator web interface. It has been difficult to prioritize these features given the diverse set of moderator needs and preferences. With the addition of the UI/UX developer to our team (Manolo Bevia; .5 FTE), we hope to leverage his expertise to take some of the guesswork out of prioritization.
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Define and implement new tools and interfaces for moderators - Continue ongoing work with moderators and arXiv IT to define and implement new tools and interfaces to support the work of moderators.
- Admins continue to meet with arXiv IT team to clarify workflow and specifications for the proposal system and moderator interface. Admins have also relayed feedback from moderators to developers related to tools and interface. Also in this scope of work the admins lead the work on the Moderator Survey conducted in fall 2016.
- Status: 2016 work complete
Implement new administrative staffing configuration - Hire, train, and integrate Operations Manager into arXiv administration unit
as
- Jim Entwood was brought on in February
New positions
- in the new position of Operations Manager.
were also created. The new
- Additional staffing changes include hiring Rebecca Rich Goldweber to the new position of Associate Administrator and promoting Andrea Salguero and Jake Weiskoff to the position of Senior Administrator
- . This staffing configuration allows the admin team to handle increasing workload, improve quality of service to users and moderators, and adapt to emerging needs.
- Status: complete
Complete and publish physics category descriptions - Work with physics subject committee and its chair to get final approval for physics subject category descriptions.
As of November this work has not been completed. Some progress has been made by admins and moderators and we have gathered descriptions for most but not all subject categories. Still to do is to draft descriptions of remaining categories and send the draft to the committee.
- Work in progress.
- Status: deferred to complete in 2017
Publish current policy statements where needed - Work with Scientific Director to compose and publish appropriate policy statements regarding endorsements and appeals.
Updates to endorsement and appeal related help pages were completed.
- Status: complete
Systematize arXiv's individual archive pages - The "home" pages for individual archives within arXiv have grown organically over time and are inconsistent with each other and in some cases outdated.
As of November this work has not been started. It is likely this will be moved ahead to the 2017 Roadmap.
- Status: deferred to 2017
Business Model & Governance
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This is an ongoing process as we review our goals, strategies, and performance annually, especially during the MAB and SAB meetings. One of the key outcomes of this process is modifications to the arXiv team structure based on the input gathered. In order to strengthen the daily oversight of arXiv, during 2016 we transitioned to a team model that has two full-time managers, one for IT and the other one for user support, and appointed a new CTO. Here is the current team model: arXiv Sustainability Initiative
New Partnerships & Communication
arXiv’s role in scholarly communication ecology - We will continue following the new developments in regard to public access mandates and related compliance issues. Also of interest to the arXiv team are plans for integration of standardized metadata by use of IDs like ORCID, Grant-IDs, or Institutional IDs; SHARE & CHORUS; and depositing and linking research data associated with papers. Based Based on last year's s investigation of interoperability issues, we will continue exploring how arXiv should enable communication/exchange between arXiv and institutional repositories, (for instance, pushing copies of papers published by a scientist to his/her home institution's repository).This This work is added to the Special Projects category below as we need additional funds to accomplish our goals in this domain.
We completed a preliminary assessment of how we can enable one-stop deposit and compliance reporting in support of new public access requirements such as the one from the UK (HEFCE/REF). One of the goals of the arXiv-NG initiative is to create an open architecture to allow other service providers to develop APIs as overlay services, for instance to simplify scientists' publishing process by enabling submission of an article to a journal at he same time as it is uploaded to arXiv.
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The current 5-year business plan represents a baseline maintenance scenario. It was developed based on an analysis of arXiv's baseline expenses during 2010-2012. It does not factor in any new functionality requirements or other unforeseen resource needs. Although a development reserve was established to fund such expenses, it is not sufficient to subsidize significant development efforts through surplus funds. Stewardship of resources such as arXiv involves not only covering the operational costs but also continuing to enhance their value based on the needs of the user community and the evolving patterns and modes of scholarly communication. From From users' perspective, arXiv continues to be a successful, prominent subject repository system serving the needs of many scientists around the world. However, under the hood, the service is facing significant pressures. The conclusion of the 2015 SAB and MAB annual meetings was that the arXiv team needs to embark on a significant fund raising effort, pursuing grants and collaborations. Based on the ideas and recommendations gathered last year, we've concluded that we need to first create a compelling and coherent vision to be able to persuasively articulate our fund raising goals. We’d like to use the approaching 25th anniversary of arXiv as an important milestone to engage us in a series of vision-setting exercises. Please see the the arXiv Review Strategy for more details.
We successfully completed the tasks identified in the the arXiv Review Strategy and secured funds from the Simons Foundation and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence to launch the arXiv-NG initiative. As we develop functional requirements and create use cases, the arXiv team will be informed by the special projects identified below.
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Restructure the submission system - We need to expand arXiv's workflow capabilities to better accommodate new and more complicated workflows associated with document analysis, overlap detection, and improved moderator interactions.
Accelerate legacy codebase improvements - While the arXiv software operates well, there are areas where the codebase is old and should be migrated or rewritten to make it more efficient to maintain and further develop. So we need to invest in arXiv beyond what is feasible through the operational budget in order to make it "sustainable" - easier to keep up and advance. We seek to accelerate the modest progress possible within the baseline maintenance scenario.
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