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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 Boar`ds.

 

 

User Support and Moderation

 

Business Model & Governance

Continue testing the arXiv Scientific Director position – In 2014, we created a new position to provide intellectual leadership for arXiv's operation and appointed Chris Myers as the interim Scientific Director. We’ll continue to test and refine the job description and also consider the effectiveness of the current arXiv team model. Myers' appointment extended to the end of 2016.  Position needs to be assessed, revised (if necessary), and posted in 2016.

Continue the membership drive & identify new funding sources - We continue to be encouraged with the five-year pledges and increasing number of arXiv member institutions. Creating a broad and international network of supporters require ongoing efforts. We are entering the fourth year of our 5-year business plan. One of the goals this year is to start planning for the next 5-years. Based on last year's online fund raising pilot (Give button), we aim to assess and repeat the strategy to create an additional revenue stream.  There are two SAB subgroups working with the Cornell team to .....

Continue assessing and refining the operation of the new governance model -The arXiv principles aim to clarify the authority, responsibilities, and constraints of CUL, MAB, and SAB. Ironing out problems and developing a working system will require some time to test and observe the inner operation of the governance model. We will continue our engagements with the advisory boards and experiment with different communication strategies to share our vision, priorities, and challenges and to seek their input. This is an ongoinng process as we review our goals, strategies, and performance annually,especially during the MAB and SAB meetings.

New Partnerships & Communication

arXiv’s role in scholarly communication ecology - We continue to get questions and requests from libraries, publishers, societies, and funding agencies in regard to arXiv’s role in supporting emerging OA mandates and providing features in support of compliance requirements. We will continue following the new developments in regard to open access mandates from funders and related compliance issues. Also of interest to the arXiv team are plans for integration of standardized metadata by use of IDs like ORCID, Grant-IDs, or Institutional IDs; SHARE & CHORUS. We will continue to explore issues related to depositing and linking research data associated with papers. Also, we are partnering with Hypothes.is on Alfred P. Sloan foundation grant to explore open annotations for scholarly communication. Work to be continued in 2016 - see Special Projects section below.

Interoperability of arXiv with other institutional and subject repositories.  One of the important factors in our sustainability efforts is enabling interoperability and creating efficiencies among repositories with related and complementary content to reduce duplicate efforts and bring efficiencies. We will investigate interoperability requirements to enable communication/exchange between arXiv and institutional repositories (for instance, pushing copies of papers published by a scientist to his/her home institution's repository). We formed a MAB subcommittee to identify needs and assess if and how arXiv can provide such functionality.  Also, we’ll continue to exchange information with publishers/societies represented in arXiv, especially in exploring issues such as version of record, linking pre-print to formal published version, etc.  Draft interoperability needs assessment and requirement document completed. 2015_arXiv_IR_interop_plan_draft.pdf  - project added in the Special Projects category as we need additional funds to accomplish our goals in this domain. Work to be continued in 2016 - see Special Projects section below.

Special Projects

The current 5-year business plan represents a baseline maintenance scenario. It was developed based on an analysis of the arXiv's baseline expenses during 2010-2012. It does not factor in any new functionality requirements or other unforeseen resource needs.  Although a development reserve was established to fund such  expenses, it is not sufficient to subsidize significant development efforts through surplus funds.  Stewardship of resources such as arXiv involves not only covering the operational costs but also continuing to enhance their value based on the needs of the user community and the evolving patterns and modes of scholarly communication. We need to pursue grants and engage in collaborations to secure funds to support the following goals:

Interoperability & Public Access Mandate Support

  • Add metadata fields for funding information, article status and migration of old content - arXiv team has received several requests for support for additional metadata such as funding information, version information (author manuscript, publisher version, etc.), and publication information. These changes will require extensions of our internal metadata format and handling in appropriate submission interfaces, admin interfaces, moderator screens, search systems, and data export facilities. 

  • Support arXiv-IR interoperability -Test and implement the interoperability requirements identified to enable communication/exchange between arXiv and institutional repositories (e.g., pushing copies of papers published by a scientist to his/her home institution's repository). This work may also involve working with publishers/societies represented in arXiv to exploring issues such as version of record, linking pre-print to formal published version, etc. 

  • Add linkages to datasets in data repositories - Based on our experience with the Data Conservancy pilot (http://arxiv.org/help/data_conservancy), a loose coupling to existing external data repositories seems more likely to be sustainable than close collaboration. This also has the benefit of allowing arXiv to work with many repositories, so that users can use the data repository that best matches their need, their community expectations, etc..
  • Create tools and facilities to better integrate with Computer Science conferences - Scope out a project  to ease the upload of proceeding (or other collections) by reducing the amount of custom programming required for the submission of proceedings via the SWORD interface.

  • Assign DOIs to data - We accept data as ancillary files (http://arxiv.org/help/ancillary_files) but offer relatively little support. It would be more helpful to assign DataCite DOIs from EZID to ancillary files thus making them citeable.

  • Ingest arXiv content into CUL Archival Repository - While arXiv adopts good practices for data backup and management, it is far from being an archival collection. As we increase our collaboration with other repositories and consider supporting public access mandates, we need to strengthen our preservation strategies. Work is require to script creation of submission packages (SIPs) for initial ingest (and regular incremental updates) of arXiv content to CULAR (Cornell University Library Archival Repository). Also, we'd like to explore the need for additional archival strategies (e.g., working with Portico or Lockss). 

Modernize the User Interface & Alerting System

  • Modernize the search interface, add facets, include author identifiers - The arXiv search interface could be improved to follow current best practices using facets and better result ordering.

  • Replace and improve alerting system - Replace the email alert system to allow easy subscribe/unsubscribe via web interface tied to user accounts, ensure scalability and allow customization. The current code is very old and hard to maintain, the bulk of it should be rewritten.
  • Stamp withdrawn articles - Articles in arXiv cannot be entirely removed once announced, but a withdrawal notice may be added by the submitter or by arXiv administrators (http://arxiv.org/help/withdraw). We would like to develop a system to stamp previous versions of withdrawn articles with a clear indication of withdrawal while retaining the original content and version history.

Software Restructuring & Improvement

  • Restructure the submission system - We need to expand arXiv's workflow capabilities to better accommodate new and more complicated workflows associated with document analysis, overlap detection, and improved moderator interactions.

  • Accelerate legacy codebase improvements - While the arXiv software operates well, there are areas where the codebase is old and should be migrated or rewritten to make is more efficient to maintain and further develop. So we need to invest in arXiv beyond what is feasible through the operational budget in order to make is 'sustainable' - easier to keep up and advance. We seek to accelerate the modest progress possible within the baseline maintenance scenario.

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