2015 arXiv Roadmap
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Technical
Items are listed in approximate priority order and may be adjusted based on ongoing discussions with the Scientific and Member Advisory Boards. The focus of work in 2016 is improvement of facilities for administrators and moderators in order to streamline their workflows, and to improve clarity and transparency of arXiv communications. A number of other tasks address legacy software issues.
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. Started in 2015.
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, better documenting our installation, and increasing experience within the current development team. 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 - Complete replacement of old PHP/Tapir code with more maintainable and better integrated Perl/Catalyst code.
Improve ORCID author identifier support - Deprecate the local arXiv author ids in favor or ORCID iDs throughout the arXiv user interface, add ORCID iDs to arXiv API.
Use HTTPS for all communication - The web is very rapidly moving toward secure communication (using HTTPS, HTTP over SSL) and all arXiv accesses occur over HTTPS. All existing HTTP URIs should still resolve but they should do this via a redirect to the equivalent HTTPS URI.
User Support and Moderation
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