2014 arXiv Roadmap
Technical
Items are listed in approximate priority order but this may be adjusted based on ongoing discussions with the Scientific and Member Advisory Boards.
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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
Define and implement new tools and interfaces for moderators – Continue working with moderators and arXiv IT to define and implement new tools and interfaces to support the work of moderators. See "Improve tools and interfaces to support moderators" in Technical section above.
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Develop criteria for accepting new subject domains – arXiv is occasionally asked to add a new subject domain. While there is considerable experience within the organization about what to consider regarding new domains, this has not been documented. Gather and document a set of criteria to be used when considering the feasibility of adding new subject domains to arXiv.
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 the job description and also consider the effectiveness of the current arXiv team model.
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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 new developments in regard to open access mandates from funders and related compliance issues. Also of interest to the arXiv team are plans for integration of standardized metadata by use of IDs like ORCID, Grant-IDs, or Institutional IDs; SHARE & CHORUS. We will continue to explore issues related to depositing and linking research data associated with papers. Also, we are partnering with Hypothes.is on Alfred P. Sloan foundation grant to explore open annotations for scholarly communication.
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