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Business Model & Governance
Continue testing the arXiv Scientific Director position – In 2014, we created a new position to provide intellectual leadership for arXiv's operation and appointed Chris Myers as the interim Scientific Director. We’ll continue to test and refine this position and also consider the effectiveness of the current arXiv team model.
Setting development priorities - arXiv operates on limited resources therefore it is critical for us to identify priorities. In support of this goal, we’ll experiment with an online survey to get input from both SAB and MAB in ranking and commenting on this year’s technical agenda.
Continue the membership drive & identify new funding sources - We continue to be encouraged with the five-year pledges. Creating a broad and international network of supporters require ongoing efforts. We are entering the third year of our 5-year business plan. One of the goals this year is to start planning for the next 5-years. The idea of adding a Give button was provisionally approved by SAB & MAB, contingent on a pilot proposal that will lay out the details.
Continue assessing and refining the operation of the new governance model -The arXiv principles aim to clarify the authority, responsibilities, and constraints of CUL, MAB, and SAB. Ironing out problems and developing a working system will require some time to test and observe the inner operation of the governance model. We will continue our engagements with the advisory boards and experiment with different communication strategies to share our vision, priorities, and challenges and to seek their input.
New Partnerships & Communication
arXiv’s role in scholarly communication ecology - We continue to get questions and requests from libraries, publishers, societies, and funding agencies in regard to arXiv’s role in supporting emerging OA mandates and providing features in support of compliance requirements. We will continue following the emerging open access mandates from funders & compliance issues (e.g., plans for integration of standardized metadata by use of ID like ORCID, Grant-IDs, or Institutional IDs; SHARE & CHORUS) and linking to research data. We'll discuss the importance of several initiatives vis-à-vis arXiv to review arXiv's plans and get input from our advisory boards in setting priorities.
Interoperability of arXiv with other institutional and subject repositories. We will investigate interoperability requirements to 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). We formed a MAB subcommittee to identify needs and assess if and how arXiv can provide such functionality. Related to interoperability, we’ll continue to exchange information with publishers/societies represented in arXiv, especially in exploring issues such as version of record, linking pre-print to formal published version, etc.