March 5 & March 13, 2013 Conference Call

Agenda

1) arXiv Update - Introductory Slides (20 minutes)

2) Your interest in arXiv and any specific issues you would like the MAB to pursue (15 minutes)

3) Discussion of the idea of forming MAB subgroups with the following themes (15 minutes):

Member Relations - sample topics include --> special services for membership (such as providing additional statistics to member institutions), strategies for promoting libraries' research laboratories' role in arXiv's sustainability to scientists
Financial Planning - sample topics include --> raising additional funds in order to lower the current tier structure or to support R&D projects, creating a lower-priced tier for members from developing countries, guidelines for using reserve funds, communication with members and scientists about arXiv, assessment of the current financial model, adding new arXiv members
Collaboration with Publishers and Societies --> please see the September 2011 planning meeting summary about the outcomes of a collaboration discussion with a group of publisher and society representatives - we would like to review, prioritize, and move our initial meeting recommendations into action
Research and Development Agenda --> moving beyond the current sustainability model that focuses on operations to a strategic plan for arXiv's further development and innovation, setting R&D priorities, assessing collaboration opportunities, setting a 3-5 year strategic plan for arXiv (encompassing all aspects of arXiv, not limited to technologies)

4) Questions & suggestions

Meeting Synopsis: Questions & Issues Raised

March 5, 2013

What is the future of the Simons Foundation interest?

The Simons Foundation has pledged support for five years (2013-2017) and indicated interest in another five years, depending on the success of the current model.

Is arXiv continuing with the Data Conservancy pilot?

In 2011, in collaboration with the NSF Data Conservancy project (http://dataconservancy.org/), we launched a pilot interface that allows arXiv submitters to upload data associated with their articles directly to the Data Conservancy repository. Links to the data are added in the arXiv record automatically. This was a pilot project and we are in the process of finalizing the project. After analyzing the usage data (data submissions), we have decided that the best way to support data at this point is to bring the data from the Data Conservancy back into arXiv. We will assign unique and persistent IDs to every data set.

Where are you getting the URLs for the data sets?

We'll use the EZID system from the CDL (http://www.cdlib.org/services/uc3/ezid/). Jim Mullins mentioned that Purdue is a provider of DOI's through the CDL program, too. Jim is interested in participating in the research data support issues identified in the arXiv road map.

Have you identified any priorities based on the document that proposes a collaboration agenda with publishers and societies?

In celebration of the arXiv's 20th anniversary, on September 23, 2011 Cornell University Library (CUL) hosted a meeting at Cornell with the representatives from several publishers and societies that are interested in Cornell's sustainability planning efforts. There is a report that provides a synopsis of the discussion and recommends next steps for continuing this dialogue. Since the meeting, the Cornell team has had a couple of exchanges but we decided to wait and form a small working group with representation from MAB and SAB before continuing our work. One of the proposed MAB sub-groups will focus on this work.

Can arXiv's success translate into other disciplines (expanding arXiv's scope)?

We frequently receive requests to extend arXiv to include other subject areas. We have adopted a measured approach to expansion, as there is significant organizational and administrative effort required both to create and to maintain new subject areas. Adding a new subject area involves exploring the user-base and use characteristics pertaining to the subject area, establishing the necessary advisory committees, and recruiting moderators. While we anticipate that arXiv will become increasingly broad in its subject area coverage, we believe this development must occur in a planned and strategic manner. We are making an effort to provide information about arXiv as a service and business model in order to share our experience and provide a case study for sustaining open access services.

Will we be working with the ORCID initiative?

ORCID is a community-based effort to provide a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers (http://about.orcid.org/). arXiv is very interested in this work. Simeon Warner is a member of the initiative's board of directors.

How are we planning to increase the number of new memberships?

We currently have 134 organizations that pledged a five-year support for arXiv. These are good-faith intention and are not seen as a lump-sum payment or a legally binding contract. The purpose of the arXiv member relations sub-group will be to develop strategies to broaden partnerships, including strategies such as working with scientists to increase awareness about arXiv's business model and collaboration with libraries. Broadening our membership base will help us build a strong financial base, engage a larger community, and also allow reducing the annual membership fees.

How will the SAB be involved in MAB?

We will be inviting members from the SAB to MAB and vice versa (as suggested in the SAB (to be completed in April'13 and MAB bylaws:
https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/culpublic/Member+Advisory+Board+Bylaws

Any news from the arXiv SAB?

Steven Gottlieb (Scientific Advisory Board member) described the current process to reconstitute a physics subject advisory committee group. SAB is also discussing the possibly bringing on a Scientific Director. Steve noted that the development of SAB bylaws has been very helpful as well as meeting face-to-face or online in between annual meetings is important.

March 13, 2013

Are we planning to identify MAB members for SAB + and SAB for MAB?

Yes, we just needed to get the MAB setup and running first.

How are we setting priorities?

The annual arXiv roadmap will be an important blueprint. We worked on the first one and it is available at https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/culpublic/2013+arXiv+Roadmap.
We also need to think 3-5 years out and will engage both SAB and MAB in helping us brainstorm and set priorities.

Is the SAB responsible for technological oversight of arXiv?

We intend to seek input both from MAB and SAB and each community may have differing priorities and desired system enhancements. For instance, the MAB members have expertise in interoperability, digital library infrastructures, open access system, etc. While the SAB members will be more interested in daily tools that enable them to get their work done and support scientists – such as tools to automate subject classification or assist with the moderation process. The arXiv roadmap for 2013 has several items that were set as priorities by the SAB.

How will we fund expensive development initiatives?

We have not developed a strategy yet.

The 2013 arXiv roadmap seems overwhelming, how will you prioritize?

We often underestimate the time involved in getting work done so the 2013 roadmap is likely to be ambitious. We need to revise it as we get a better sense of priorities and resource requirements.

Should the MAB be talking to their community and then shuttling the work to us?

This is an issue that we want to discuss with the Member Relations Subgroup and will bring to topic back to the larger MAB group for input.

Any news from the SAB?

David Morrison (Scientific Advisory Board member) noted that there were two tracks of work going on: changes in the governance model and changes in moderation as Paul Ginsparg's role will be transitioned to a subject advisory committee (the physics subject advisory group that Steve mentioned during the first call).

How can we get access to more usage statistics, like submission statistics?

We often receive questions about the feasibility of providing submission-based statistics and comparing them with our current institutional downloads statistics. We struggle with this issue because we recognize the importance of this data for libraries but are not able to put sufficient resources in creating and maintaining detailed statistics. The author metadata for arXiv is not sufficiently consistent to support any systematic analysis but we ran some numbers based on submitting authors' email address affiliations. Based on sampling, we have some preliminary results, which indicate that submission- and download-based data exhibit similar characteristics (interestingly based on SCOAP3 data, use and submissions from Japan is 7%). We would like to undertake some metadata remediation to improve the authorship data for existing submissions (ORCID) but this is not a short-term project and will require significant resources (relates to the question about arXiv's priorities).

Will the arXiv subgroups include members from other groups, such as publishers or SAB?

This will be an ongoing conversation and a great one to start in the subgroups and bring back to MAB for discussion.

Given that there no specific goals for each subgroup, how shall we work?
The sub-groups are intended to act in some capacity as advisory groups to MAB in order to speed decisions along, but of course subgroups can set their own agenda, priorities, etc. We would like to experiment with the idea of working in smaller groups in order to focus on specific issues. We will need quick ways to seek input and want to see how this model will work. We are open for other suggestions - this is an experiment.

What is the goal of the September meeting?
It is too soon to set a specific agenda but this will be a working meeting with a set of questions and issues to explore. The agenda will partially emerge from the arXiv subgroups' work.

How is arXiv affected by the recent US open access mandate (OSTP open access memorandum)?
We are not sure if and how we will be affected by the new mandate particularly since arXiv is international in scope. Mackenzie pointed out that UC is developing funds to help researchers cover article processing costs but could avoid some of those if, for instance, arXiv is consider a repository of choice for government mandates.

Working Groups & Next Conference Call Agenda

The next conference call will be for each working group to discuss the mission of the group (modify it) and start working on these issues:

Member Relations - sample topics include --> special services for membership (such as providing additional statistics to member institutions), strategies for promoting libraries' research laboratories' role in arXiv's sustainability to scientists
Members: Jim, Eva, Molly, Zhixiong

Financial Planning - sample topics include --> raising additional funds in order to lower the current tier structure or to support R&D projects, creating a lower-priced tier for members from developing countries, guidelines for using reserve funds, communication with members and scientists about arXiv, assessment of the current financial model, adding new arXiv members
Members: Uwe (Esther), Yuri, Philip

Collaboration with Publishers and Societies --> please see the September 2011 planning meeting summaryabout the outcomes of a collaboration discussion with a group of publisher and society representatives - we would like to review, prioritize, and move our initial meeting recommendations into action
Members: Catriona, Carol, Tim, Diane, Tommy

Research and Development Agenda --> moving beyond the current sustainability model that focuses on operations to a strategic plan for arXiv's further development and innovation, setting R&D priorities, assessing collaboration opportunities, setting a 3-5 year strategic plan for arXiv (encompassing all aspects of arXiv, not limited to technologies)
Members: Tommy, Mackenzie

Conference Call Participants

March 5, 2013

Catriona Cannon, Associate Director, Collection Support, Bodleian Libraries, Jisc, UK
Steven Gottlieb, Distinguished Professor of Physics, Indiana University, US, Scientific Advisory Board Member
Carol Hoover, Digital Information Resources Manager, Los Alamos National Laboratory, US
Eva Isaksson, Physics Librarian, University of Helsinki, Finland
Jim Mullins, Dean of Libraries at Purdue University, Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), US
Tommy Ohlsson, Professor, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Department of Theoretical Physics, Sweden
Esther Tobschall (German National Library of Science and Technology) standing in for:
Uwe Rosemann, Director, German National Library of Science and Technology - TIB, Germany (Consortium arXiv-DH and HGF: Coordinated by the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) and Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, Germany)
Yuri Tschinkel, Director of Mathematics and the Physical Sciences, Professor of Mathematics, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, US, Simons Foundation Representative
Molly White, Director, Math, Physics, Astronomy Library (PMA), University of Texas, Austin, US