2014 arXiv Roadmap
Technical
Items are listed in approximate priority order .
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
but this may be adjusted based on input from the Scientific and Member advisory boards.
Improve moderator web interface, add personal checkbox - We want to encourage moderator use of the web interface to streamline their workflow. The moderator web interface was significantly extended and improved in 2014. Work will improve clarity based on the feedback we have received and provide each moderator with the ability to mark submissions as checked.
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.
Add automatic overlap detection for new submissions - Develop pipeline for checking of new submissions against existing corpus and staged submissions. Develop warnings for administrators and moderators based on overlap check results. Make these warnings available for administrators and moderators.
Add ORCID author identifier support 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 has implemented storage of affiliation identifiers in the profile data). ORCID identifiers will be associated with arXiv user accounts via the ORCID OAuth process.
Category aliasing for cs/math/stat - There are three category merges (aliases) requested. Some of these require extra work because there are pre-0704 (old identifiers, 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. Includes work to create tools for the bulk re-categorization of submissions affected by this and later merges.
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 put effort into updating our TeX installation, improving our packaging so that it can more easily be deployed and updated, and better documenting our installation. 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.
Migrate functions away from old PHP/Tapir codebase and into Perl/Catalyst - We have been gradually replacing old PHP/Tapir code with more maintainable and better integrated Perl/Catalyst code.
Replace and improve email alert system - Replace the email alert system to allow easy subscribe/unsubscribe via web interface tied to user accounts, ensure scalability and allow customization.
Assign DOIs to data - We accept data as ancillary files http://arxiv.org/help/ancillary_files but offer relatively little support. It would be more helpful to assign DataCite DOIs from EZID to ancillary files thus making them citeable. Also, we have discontinued the Data Conservancy pilot and plan to pull the DC data in as ancillary files (see http://arxiv.org/help/data_conservancy and http://blogs.cornell.edu/dsps/2013/06/14/arxiv-data-conservancy-pilot/).
Use local instance of classifier code - We should integrate the classifier code into the arXiv production system rather than using API to code running on Paul Ginsparg's research machine. This was agreed by the SAB on 2013-09.
Ingest arXiv content into CUL Archival Repository - While arXiv adopts good practices for data backup and management, it is far from being an archival collection. We should have regular ingest of all arXiv content into a separate archival system and propose using CULAR (Cornell University Library Archival Repository). Work is require to script creation of submission packages (SIPs) for initial ingest and regular incremental updates.
Add metadata fields for funding information, article status and migration of old content - There have been several requests for support for additional metadata. These include work to add funding information (requests from supporting members), for the ability to store version information (author manuscript, publisher version, etc.), and for publication information of migrated content (mainly for conference proceedings in computer science). These changes will require extensions of our internal metadata format and handling in appropriate submission interfaces, admin interfaces, moderator screens, search systems, and data export facilities. It may well be appropriate to generalize our models/code in some places.
User Support and Moderation
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