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arXiv has started 2015 with an important milestone as we added the one-millionth paper at the end of December’14. 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 continues to be international in scope, with mirror sites in seven countries and collaborations with U.S. and foreign professional societies and other international organizations.
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Since we have started the arXiv sustainability initiative in 2010, an integral part of our work has been assessing the services, technologies, standards, and policies that constitute arXiv. Here are some of our key accomplishments from 2014 to illustrate the range of issues we have been trying to tackle. Please see the 2104 Roadmap (LINK) for a fuller account of our work.
User Support and Moderation
- Added over 12 new physics moderators. arXiv is a moderated scholarly communication forum informed and guided by scientists and the scientific cultures it serves. Almost 150 expert moderators review 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 Physics Advisory Committee to implement an effective moderation process for the General Physics category and recruited a Gen-ph moderator
- Started working with various stakeholders to define the role of the Scientific Director with respect to daily moderation processes and workflows
Technical Features and Infrastructure
- Started improving tools and interfaces to allow moderators to interact more directly and efficiently with the arXiv system and administrators based on input from the Scientific Advisory Board and moderators (to be continued in 2015)
- Made several improvements such as expanded the arXiv ID to be prepared for 10,000 submissions/month milestone and adding automatic classification checks to submission system and integrated with moderator alerting
- Created a summary documentation the arXiv codebase arrangement, technologies, and areas of personnel expertise
- · Further improved security by implementing Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS)for all login and account interaction and initiated the implementation of strategies to protect submitters’ email addresses from being harvested, and
- Started integrating an automatic overlap detection application developed by Paul Gingparg to comparing new submissions with existing corpus and generate notifications for administrators and moderators
Governance, Communication, & Organizational Model
- Recruited Chris Myers as the interim Scientific Director to formulate overall scientific direction of the service and its policies
- Formed several Member Advisory Board (MAB) and Scientific Advisory Board 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 bylaw.
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 needs.
- Held an annual meeting for SAB and MAB to discuss IT development priorities, financial state, moderation tools and policies, and fund raising strategies.
Technical Features and Infrastructure
Governance, Communication, & Organizational Model
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Our 2015 plans are outlines in the 2015 roadmap. We are grateful for your continuing support of arXiv and welcome your questions and comments.
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