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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 2015 to illustrate the range of issues we have been trying to tackle. Please see the 2015 Roadmap for a fuller account of our work.
User Support and Moderation
- Recruited over 12 new physics moderators. arXiv is a moderated scholarly communication forum informed and guided by scientists and the scientific cultures it serves. Over 150 experts worldwide moderate 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 the Physics Advisory Committee to analyze and redesign moderation coverage and workflow for the General Physics category, including the recruitment and hiring of a General Physics 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 expanding the arXiv ID to be prepare for 10,000 submissions/month milestone and adding automatic classification checks to submission system (integrated with moderator alerting).
- Created a summary documentation the arXiv codebase arrangement, technologies, and areas of personnel expertise.
- Started integrating an automatic overlap detection application developed by Paul Ginsparg 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 (arXiv's organizational model).
- Formed several Member Advisory Board (MAB) and Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) 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 bylaws.
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 current and emerging use patterns.
- Held an annual meeting for SAB and MAB to discuss IT development priorities, financial state, moderation tools and policies, and fund raising strategies.
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