Technical
Complete development issues from 2012-09-21 Scientific Advisory Board meeting - The SAB agreed a number of changes in the way arXiv should send emails to moderators and control user selection of categories. Changes also add the ability for moderators to comment on and put submissions on "hold" without the need for arXiv admin interaction, a first step toward empowering moderators though more direct facilities. Work was started in 2012 and will be completed in early 2013.
Complete move of servers to virtual machine (VM) infrastructure - In 2012 we migrated two out of three of arXiv's server machines to new VMs. We will complete the move by migration our main web server to pair of load-balanced VMs managed by IT@Cornell. This arrangement will support scaling to additional web front-ends as necessary. As part of this transition we will formalize the update and maintenance process for these machines, and remove access by non-CUL or IT@Cornell staff.
Change email handling to support arXiv admin and moderation ticketing system - The "Request Tracker" software has been selected and we will rework email filtering software to use this instead the current email-based arXiv admin workflows.
Add automatic classification checks to submission system - We will use classifier software developed by Paul Ginsparg to classify incoming submissions according to our category scheme. Where these automatic classifications differ significantly from the user-selected classifications we will add a warning to the moderator alerts.
Improve tools and interfaces to support moderators - We will work with the SAB and moderators to define and develop better tools that allow moderators to interact more directly and efficiently the arXiv system and administrators. The overarching aim is to make best use of available moderator effort by making the work of moderators as quick and convenient as possible, consistent with achieving the quality goals and following policies set out by the SAB.
Implement new category aliases for cs/math/stat and add a new category for q-fin - In the past the creation of category aliases (e.g. math.IT/cs.IT) and associated recategorization of articles has required a mix of manual DB edits and one-off scripting. We will develop tools to safely do bulk edits of this sort. Testing is also required to ensure that having articles where the primary classification does not match the old-style id as a result of these new aliases is handled correctly everywhere.
Improve author identifier support and data export - Add basic support for ORCID and other author identifiers associated with arXiv accounts. Add periodic data dumps for all public authorship data.
Improve dataset support - Review use of and experience with the Data Conservancy pilot and then either discontinue or improve interaction. Decide on a medium-term strategy for data and consider assigning DataCite DOIs for ancillary filesInvenio for display and access - It was decided in 2010 to move the display and access functionality of arXiv to the Invenio platform developed at CERN. The primary goal of this move it to reduce the maintenance burden of in-house code and share the effort of developing new features with other organizations using this open-source software. The move to Invenio will facilitate improved collaboration with our partners at NASA ADS and INSPIRE. Work to data (Aug 2012) on this move has progressed slowly because of unforeseen difficulties and staffing shortage. We are currently re-planning this work with the intention of redirecting a significant fraction of the development team's effort to Invenio in Fall 2012. The goal is to deploy this system in 2013 and at that time enable horizontal scaling of the arXiv web user-interface to cope with our ever-increasing traffic.
Security and login, email privacy - There are significant flaws in arXiv's security and we are lucky that we have not been targeted. Issues include: all password entry and authenticated interactions should occur via https; domain based cookies should not be sent to mirror sites; and user email addresses should be more carefully protected.
2014 (If there are any 2014 goals we know of, let's put them in this roadmap as 'planning work')
Alerting system - The email alerting system remains extremely popular but the mechanisms for subscription management are extremely outdated. Users should be able to see and control their subscriptions from their user account page. New software will be developed to replace the extremely old and hard to maintain software implementing the current email subscription system.
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User Support and Moderation
Strengthen physics moderation - We need a sustainability effort aimed at strengthening physics moderation. This will involve finding additional moderators and seeking new leadership within the arXiv physics community. Over the years, physics moderation has grown substantially dependent on Paul Ginsparg's involvement. With Paul's expressed desire to cease this routine involvement, we need to attract new people, explore new strategies, and build up the supporting infrastructure for physics moderation. This effort can in turn inform other subject areas with regard to effective and sustainable moderation practices.
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