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• Identify a number of areas to be considered for a vision setting process and create a survey instrument -  IN PROCESSCOMPLETED
• Conduct a SAB/MAB survey to poll their opinions on future directions and priorities - - IN PROCESS(Vision Setting Survey) - COMPLETED
• Start the user survey planning process based on the initial findings from the vision exercise, taking into consideration different segments: users as readers, users as submitter, users as moderators - COMPLETED
• Hire a part-time person (or assign this role to an existing staff) to work with us in coordinating the planning activities - COMPLETED

January-March 2016:

• Analyze and report findings of the vision setting exercise and organize follow up discussions
• Start the 2016 annual fund raising campaign with the goal of increasing annual contributions (MAB subgroup will come up with recommendations to increase annual membership revenue)
• Plan, test, conduct a user survey Analyze and report findings of based on the initial findings from the vision setting exercise and organize follow up discussionsexercise, taking into consideration different segments: users as readers, users as submitter, users as moderators
• Hold the first planning meeting with a small group (10-12) of colleagues representing scientists, librarians, funders, publishers/societies, federal agencies to discuss our preliminary findings
• Receive recommendations from the MAB IT subgroup about hosting a meeting with experts to consider arXiv's current infrastructure and workflows - hold an initial planning meeting
• Host IT external consultants to advise us on future directions
• Consider submitting an NSF workshop proposal (based on finding thus far that need to be further explored)
• Continue to identify funding sources, make initial contacts
• Repeat the online fund raising campaign (Give button) based on the findings of the pilot conducted in September 2015

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• Vision - grant writing and work plans (our hope is that by then through the planning activities during the last several months, we'll already have ideas for funding sources and even might have done some initial work)

Vision Setting Survey Outline

We are in the process of developing a survey instrument to get your input on what sorts of services arXiv should be providing. Our primary goal will be getting feedback on "what arXiv should be doing" rather than "how is arXiv doing it.” Here are some of the issues that will be included in the survey:

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 (2) Quality Control = How important is it that arXiv maintain or develop policies and procedures to assure quality of arXiv submissions? Keeping unrefereeable papers out; insuring proper category placement; identifying excessive text reuse of authors or excessive unattributed text reuse by other authors (plagiarism); identifying minor technical problems with submissions (line numbers in text, missing references, formatting problems, etc.); ensuring that external commentaries on arXiv papers (linked to via trackbacks on arXiv pages) are of sufficient scientific quality

(3) Balancing Rapid Dissemination and Quality Control = How to balance rapid turnaround and quality control (QC).

(4) Importance of Supporting New Services = Citation analysis, reference extraction, and linking; better linking to research data, code, etc. support to include related and underlying materials; improved search interface/functionality; allowing the addition of user-curated links associated with papers (videos, slides, links to related papers, etc.); support for public access mandates, including deposit (e.g., funder ID), compliance reporting, etc.; enable interoperability with Institutional Repositories and other repositories; submission of papers for formal publication review simultaneously as they are being deposited on arXiv (this feature can be seen as a new feature or an integration); new alerting system with greater customization of reader interests and recommendations for related content; other services to pursue not listed above.

(5) Subject Area Expansion = arXiv currently accepts submissions in Physics, Math, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics. New subject areas of interest and strategies.