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Implement secure communication (SSL/https) for all login and account interactions on arXiv - All interactions with the submission, moderation and admin system should be over SSL. The login in particular exposes arXiv to sniffing attacks for user, moderator or admin credentials, and is especially and issue when users login on unsecured wifi. Complete 2014-09
Improve tools and interfaces to support moderators - Work with the SAB and moderators to define and develop better tools that allow moderators to interact more directly and efficiently with 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. In progress 2014-09 Completed several improvements, further work in progress
Add automatic classification checks to submission system and integrate with moderator alerting - Need to set Paul Ginsparg's classifier software and model data up on a production server and understand how we will deploy software and model updates from him. Will need to work out how to call this from the submission system for new articles, including pipelining the text extraction needed for the classification to work. Based on response from classifier add information to moderator email and also make classification information available on /mod/ pages. Consider thresholds for alert for reclassification. Complete 2014-09, further work being done to refine notifications
Provide summary documentation of the arXiv code to SAB - Provide documentation of the arXiv codebase arrangement, technologies and areas of personnel expertise. Do this as an exercise of updating, fleshing-out, and organizing information on the arXiv wiki. Provide dumped snapshot to SAB. Complete 2014-09
Do category aliasing for cs/math/stat and new category for q-fin - There are three category merges (aliases) requested and one new category requested. Some of these are problematic because there are pre-0704 (old id) submissions that exists with primary category that is becoming an alias and so will "break" the primary<->id correspondence. In the past aliases have been made on an ad-hoc basis by Simeon Warner. We should instead work out and document procedures for such changes. We will need to create some tools for the bulk re-categorization of submissions affected by merges. New q-fin category created. Aliases , aliases in cs/math/stat not started 2014-09
Add automatic overlap detection comparing new submissions with existing corpus and generate notifications for administrators and moderators - Work with Paul Ginsparg to obtain bulk overlap check software and install on production servers. Develop pipeline for checking of new submissions against existing corpus and staged submissions. Developer warnings for administrators and moderators based on overlap check results. Make these warnings available in moderator emails and on /mod/ and /admin/ pages.Separate checks for Completed duplicate submissions checks based on close titles in progress. Full title similarity, implementation of full overlap detection not started 2014-09
Investigate and expand the id range to yymm.nnnnn - We have already had months with > 8000 submissions (1210=> 8452, 1304 => 8135), and must soon expect to have > 9999 submissions in a month. This requires migration to yymm.nnnnn ids instead of the current yymm.nnnnn. Assessment of impact complete. Implementation of changes in progress 2014-09. From January 2015 submissions will get yymm.nnnnn identifiers, existing submissions will retain yymm.nnnn identifiers
Add support for ORCID and other author identifiers associated with authors - We would like to support ORCID identifiers for better interoperability with other repositories implementing authority control and also as a route toward providing institutional statistics for member organizations (because ORCID is implementing storage of affiliation in the profile data). In Work in progress 2014-09
Ingest data from discontinued Data Conservancy pilot and assign DOIs to data as ancillary files - We have discontinued the Data Conservancy pilot but not yet pulled the data into arXiv. We continue of accept ancillary files but offer relatively little support. Plan to pull the DC data in and to assign DataCite DOIs from EZID to ancillary files thus making them citeable. Not started 2014-09 Work in progress, data has been copied from Data Conservancy
Submitter email addresses should not be harvestable - Currently submitter email addresses are stored in the metadata (.abs) files and in the listings files. While the web user interface does hide this information somewhat, the email addresses to too easily harvestable and potentially misused. We have had complaints from users where collaborating services have made the emails available. We should instead keep the submitter email addresses only in the database, and not in the metadata or listings files. Implemented protections in view-email pages. Not , not yet removed from metadata files 2014-09
Replace email alert system for better maintainability, to allow easy subscribe/unsubscribe, and for flexible options - Replace email alert system: allow changes via web interface tied to user accounts, make maintainable code, ensure scalability and customization. Not started 2014-09. Work not started
User Support and Moderation
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