arXiv has

DRAFT 

arXiv started 2015 with an important milestone as we added the one-millionth paper .

We are pleased to report that we currently have 173 members representing 22 countries.

at the end of December’14 (press release &  video). Since its inception in 1991 with a focus on the high energy physics community, arXiv has significantly expanded both its subject coverage and user base. During 2014, the repository saw 90,000 new submissions and close to 81 million downloads from all over the world. arXiv has international scope, with submissions and readership from around the world, and collaborations with U.S. and foreign professional societies and other international organizations.

arXiv's funding and governance is based on a membership program that engages To help with arXiv's support and governance, the membership program aims to engage libraries and research laboratories worldwide that represent arXivthe repository's heaviest institutional users. Each member institution pledges a five-year initial funding commitment to support arXivWe are pleased to report that we currently have 183 members representing 24 countries . arXiv's sustainability plan is founded on and presents a business model for generating revenues. Cornell University Library (CUL), the Simons Foundation, and a global collective of institutional members support arXiv financially. The financial model for 2013-2017 entails three sources of revenues:

• CUL provides a cash subsidy of $75,000 per year in support of arXiv's operational costs and . In addition, CUL makes an in-kind contribution of all indirect costs, which currently represents 37% of total operating expenses.
• The Simons Foundation contributes $50,000 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 four tiers from $1,500-$3,000.

In

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2014, Cornell raised

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approximately $341,000 through membership fees from

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183 institutions and the total revenue (including CUL and Simons Foundation direct contributions) is around $766,000. We are grateful for Simons Foundation's support. The gift aims to encourage has encouraged long-term community support by lowering arXiv membership fees, making participation affordable to a broader range of institutions. This support helps model aims to ensure that the ultimate responsibility for sustaining arXiv remains with the research communities and institutors institutions that benefit from the service most directly.

An Since we have started the arXiv sustainability initiative in 2010, an integral part of our sustainability planning process work has been assessing the services, technologies, standards, and policies that constitute arXiv. The sustainability of arXiv also depends on enabling interoperability and creating efficiencies among repositories with related and complementary content to reduce duplicate efforts. 2013 has been a transition year for arXiv including adding new staff and exploring new organizational models. Here are some of our key accomplishments and areas that are work-in-progress:from 2014 to illustrate the range of issues we have been trying to tackle.  Please see the 2014 Roadmap for a fuller account of our work.

User Support and Moderation

• Worked with the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) to formalize the responsibilities of the subject advisory committeesRecruited over 12 new physics moderators. arXiv is a moderated scholarly communication forum informed and guided by scientists and the scientific cultures it serves. Over 150 experts worldwide moderate submissions to verify that they are topical and of interest to the scientific community, follow accepted standards of scholarly communication, and are classified in the appropriate subject categories.
• Worked with the SAB to elect a new Chair to the Physics Advisory Committee and resurrect that committee.
• Began identifying moderators for physics categories without moderation (filled out seven categories lacking moderators).
• Began working with with moderators to define requirements for new tools and interfaces to support their work in a more systematic way.
• to analyze and redesign moderation coverage and workflow for the General Physics category, including the recruitment and hiring of a General Physics moderator
• Started working with various stakeholders to define the role of the Scientific Director with respect to daily moderation processes and workflowsShifted all communications with users and moderators to a web-based issue tracking system (Request Tracker). The new system provides better tracking and built-in reporting for answering user questions, troubleshooting technical problems, soliciting and following up on moderator input, responding to and resolving moderation appeals, etc.

Technical Features and Infrastructure

• Migrated all servers to virtual machines infrastructure and increased capacity.
• Migrated help and moderation arXiv admin interactions from email to a ticketing system.
• Gathered requirements to improve Started improving tools and interfaces to support allow moderators in interacting to interact more directly and efficiently with the arXiv system and administrators . Started work on improvements.Reviewed use of and experience with the Data Conservancy pilot, which ended in March 2013 (see pilot documentation of our conclusions). We will continue to support modest sized datasets and other materials using the existing ancillary files mechanism and will ingest data from the pilot as ancillary files to support it long-termbased on input from the Scientific Advisory Board and moderators (to be continued in 2015).
• Made several improvements such as expanding the arXiv ID to be prepare for 10,000 submissions/month milestone and adding automatic classification checks to submission system (integrated with moderator alerting).
• Created a summary documentation the arXiv codebase arrangement, technologies, and areas of personnel expertise.
• Started integrating an automatic overlap detection application developed by Paul Ginsparg to comparing new submissions with existing corpus and generate notifications for administrators and moderators.

Governance, Communication, & Organizational Model

• Created an Recruited Chris Myers as the interim Scientific Director position to bring in scientific expertise to Cornell's arXiv team and to provide intellectual leadership for formulate overall scientific direction of the service and its policies (arXiv's operation. We are in the process of recruiting an interim Scientific Director in order to test and further refine this position.organizational model).
• Established a Formed several Member Advisory Board (MAB) to represent participating institutions’ interests and to provide input to CUL on issues related to repository management and development, standards implementation, interoperability, development priorities, business planning, and outreach and advocacy. Representation on MAB is reserved for libraries, research institutions, laboratories, and foundations that are members of arXiv and that contribute to the financial support of the service. The MAB bylaws detail the goals, composition, operation, and election of the Board.
• Created bylaws for the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) to describe the group's  goals, composition, operation, and member election process.
• and Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) subgroups to focus on specific issues such as the IT prioritization, recruitment of a scientific director, evaluation of membership & revenue model.
• Appointed two new SAB members based on a nomination and election process specified by the SAB bylaws.

New Partnerships & Communication

• Continued the dialogue with several publishers and societies to assess the idea of facilitating deposit of author version of articles to arXiv after they are published (work-in-progress).
• Engaged the MAB members in an informal survey of arXiv user experiences from their home institutions to expand our understanding  preferences and current and emerging use patternsDeveloped a program roadmap (2013 & 2014) to bring further transparency to arXiv team's goals and priorities, especially for SAB and MAB members to help them understand the vision, priorities, and challenges to be able to contribute to the arXiv’s governance.
• Held an annual meeting for SAB and MAB . The discussion topics included: budget review, to discuss IT development priorities, financial state, moderation tools and policies, Scientific Director position, arXiv reserve policy, and fund raising strategies.
• Developed a set of procedures for describing how arXiv reserve funds can be used
• Created a Library Guide to provide basic information about arXiv.
Continued the dialogue with a group of publishers/societies that are interested in Cornell's sustainability planning efforts to discuss the emerging mandates for open access and ideas for collaboration.

Our 2015 plans are outlined in the 2015 Roadmap.  We are grateful for your continuing support of arXiv and welcome your questions and comments. 

Cornell University Library, arXiv Team

Chris Myers (Scientific Director), Jaron Porciello (Membership Program Lead), Oya Y. Rieger (Program Director), David Ruddy (User Support Lead), Simeon Warner (IT Lead)

Contact email: support@arXiv.org