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In 2015, Cornell raised approximately $372,000 through membership fees from 188 institutions and the total revenue (including CUL and Simons Foundation direct contributions) is around $815,511. We are grateful for Simons Foundation's support. The gift has encouraged long-term community support by lowering arXiv membership fees , and making participation affordable to a broader range of institutions. This model aims to ensure that the ultimate responsibility for sustaining arXiv remains with the research communities and institutions that benefit from the service most directly.
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.
- 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 a more productive 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 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 2016).
- 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 and refine 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 (generated $16,000 in one week).
- Investigated interoperability requirements to enable communication/exchange between arXiv and institutional repositories.
- Maintained worldwide network of arXiv moderators--over 150 subject experts who verify that submissions are topical and of interest to the scientific community, follow accepted standards of scholarly communication, and are classified in the appropriate subject categories.
- Held discussions with NSF program managers to better understand how arXiv's ongoing operations and new initiatives might best fit in to NSF programs.
- Held an annual meeting for the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) and Member Advisory Board (MAB) to discuss IT development priorities, financial state, moderation tools and policies, and fund raising strategies.
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