2015 arXiv Roadmap
Technical
Items are listed in approximate priority order and may be adjusted based on ongoing discussions with the Scientific and Member Advisory Boards. The focus of work in 2016 is improvement of facilities for administrators and moderators in order to streamline their workflows, and to improve clarity and transparency of arXiv communications. A number of other tasks address legacy software issues.
Allow moderators to recategorize articles via the web interface - We want to encourage moderator use of the web interface to streamline their workflow and to avoid unnecessary reliance on admins as intermediaries. Moderators should be able to make specific category change recommendations via the web interface that result in alerts to other appropriate moderators.
Update, reorganize and better document the TeX system - TeX is currently a central component of our article processing, approximately 85% of submissions are TeX or PDFTeX source. We need to update our TeX installation, improving our packaging so that it can more easily be deployed and updated, better documenting our installation, and increasing experience within the current development team. We need to update the tex binaries to the current version of TeX Live (currently TeX Live 2011, should use 2014), update our set of style files (last update was 2011), and also update our ghostscript installation.
Migrate functions away from old PHP/Tapir codebase and into Perl/Catalyst - Complete replacement of old PHP/Tapir code with more maintainable and better integrated Perl/Catalyst code.
Improve ORCID author identifier support - Deprecate the local arXiv author ids in favor or ORCID iDs throughout the arXiv user interface, add ORCID iDs to arXiv API.
Use HTTPS for all of web interface - The web is rapidly moving toward secure communication (using HTTPS, HTTP over SSL) and all arXiv accesses occur over HTTPS. All existing HTTP URIs should still resolve but they should do this via a redirect to the equivalent HTTPS URI.
Refine process for addition of overlap notices - Following the September 2016 recommendation of the Scientific Advisory Board, we will implement a process to put submissions on-hold when overlap with other articles is detected by Paul Ginsparg's system. This will provide authors an opportunity to respond to warnings before overlap notices are added.
Consolidate web presence at the main site - The arXiv mirror network was very useful in the early days of arXiv and web. However, geographic locality of servers is much less useful now than it was when the mirror network was established, the mirrors a little used, and maintaining support for mirrors impedes development of new features on arXiv. We will discontinue the remaining six arXiv mirrors and improve capacity of the main site network. A presence at Los Alamos National Laboratory will be retained to support http://xxx.lanl.gov/ URIs and we will investigate support for TeX processing for A4 paper.
Subject category aliasing for cs/math/stat - There are three subject category merges (aliases) requested in order to better represent subject areas that span major discipline boundaries. Some of these require extra work because there are pre-0704 (old identifiers, see http://arxiv.org/help/arxiv_identifier) submissions where the primary category is becoming an alias and thus the historical primary archive to identifier prefix correspondence will be broken. In the past aliases have been made on an ad-hoc basis and without the need to change existing primary archive designations. We should instead work out and document procedures for such changes. Includes work to create tools for the bulk re-categorization of submissions affected by this and later merges.
Streamline moderator and admin interactions - Work with arXiv moderators to streamline their interactions with the system and with arXiv administrators. Will include better handling of warnings from classification and overlap detection systems, better presentation of discussions of issues and more facilities directly in the moderator web interface.
Tidy arXiv code and version control systems, improve test coverage, remove unused code - arXiv's codebase has evolved over more than 20 years and while there have been a number of reorganizations over this time, and work to add tests, focused work on improving structure and test coverage will improve maintainability and development productivity. We also need to remove unused code and re-evaluate legacy bug reports.
User Support and Moderation
Define and implement new tools and interfaces for moderators – Continue ongoing work with moderators and arXiv IT to define and implement new tools and interfaces to support the work of moderators.
Implement new administrative staffing configuration - Hire, train, and integrate Operations Manager into arXiv administration unit.
Complete and publish physics category descriptions - Work with physics subject committee and its chair to get final approval for physics subject category descriptions.
Publish current policy statements where needed - Work with Scientific Director to compose and publish appropriate policy statements regarding endorsements and appeals.
Systematize arXiv's individual archive pages - The 'home' pages for individual archives within arXiv have grown organically over time and are inconsistent with each other and in some cases outdated.
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.
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 ongoing process as we review our goals, strategies, and performance annually,especially during the MAB and SAB meetings.
Changes to the arXiv team model - In order to strengthen the daily oversight of arXiv, we will transition to a team model that has two full-time managers, one for IT and the other one for user support. Here is a slide that shows the current and new model: arXiv Org Chart
New Partnerships & Communication
arXiv’s role in scholarly communication ecology - We will continue following the new developments in regard to public access mandates 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; and depositing and linking research data associated with papers.
Interoperability of arXiv with other institutional and subject repositories. Based on last year's investigation of interoperability issues, we will continue exploring how arXiv should should 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). This work is added to the Special Projects category below as we need additional funds to accomplish our goals in this domain.
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. 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 2015 SAB and MAB annual meetings was that the arXiv team needs to embark on a significant fund raising effort, pursuing grants and collaborations. Based on the ideas and recommendations gathered last year, we've concluded that we need to first create a compelling and coherent vision to be able to persuasively articulate our fund raising goals. 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. Please see our nascent arXiv Review Strategy for more details.
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.