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- CUL provides a cash subsidy of $75,000 per year in support of arXiv's operational costs. In addition, CUL makes an in-kind contribution of all indirect costs, which currently represents 37% of total operating expenses.
- The Simons Foundation contributes $100$50,000 per year (recently raised from the original commitment of $50,000will be raised to $100,000 starting in 2016) in recognition of CUL's stewardship of arXiv. In addition, the Foundation matches $300,000 per year of the funds generated through arXiv membership fees.
- Each member institution pledges a five-year funding commitment to support arXiv. Based on institutional usage ranking, the annual fees are set in four tiers from $1,500-$3,000.
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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
- Evaluated the arXiv administration processes in light of evolving moderation tools and staffing needs and created and posted a new position (arXiv Operations Manager) to ensure an for an optimal administrative staffing configuration
- Reviewed the current arXiv endorsement procedures and policies across all subject categories for seeking greater uniformity and transparency
- Proposed and modified a new appeal process to work toward uniform policies across all subject categories.
- Continued 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 20152016).
- 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
- Initiated a process to update, reorganize, and better document the TeX system, which is a central component of our article processing and will continue this project in 2016
- Added ORCID author identifier support for better interoperability with other repositories implementing authority control and also as a route toward providing institutional statistics for member organizations
- Began to review the "stock" messages used by arXiv administrators when communicating with submitters and other arXiv users to improve their usefulness
- Developed a set of questions for assessing and accepting new subject domains to arXiv
- Piloted an online donation button to experiment with ways to expand arXiv’s revenue sources.
- Investigated interoperability requirements to enable communication/exchange between arXiv and institutional repositories
- Recruited over ?? new moderators as 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
- Held an annual meeting for Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) and Member Advisory Board (MAB)
- 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.
From users' perspective, arXiv continues to be a successful, prominent subject repository system serving the needs of many scientists around the world. However, under the hood, the service is facing significant pressures. The conclusion of the recent SAB and MAB annual meetings was that the arXiv team needs to embark on a significant fund raising effort, pursuing grants and collaborations. We need to first create a compelling and coherent vision to be able to persuasively articulate our fund raising goals beyond the current sustainability plan that aims to support the baseline operation. We’d like to use the approaching 25th anniversary of arXiv as an important milestone to engage us in a series of vision-setting exercises. The 2016 roadmap includes our goals within the scope of the current business model. In addition, we have an initial action plan for for ....
Cornell University Library, arXiv Team
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