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 recent SAB and MAB annual meetings was that the arXiv team needs to embark on a significant fund raising effort, pursuing grants and collaborations. After the meeting, Chris and Simeon met with a group of NSF program officers and Oya visited the Sloan Foundation to discuss the current state of arXiv, pressure points, possible development, and funding sources. Based on the ideas and recommendations gathered, 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, and would deeply appreciate the insights of both the SAB and MAB in helping us to articulate a vision for arXiv moving forward.

Strategy and Timeline for Vision Setting and Fund Raising

November-December 2015:

• Relay to SAB/MAB our plans: We want to engage in fund raising after we set a vision and create a compelling set of goals - DONE
• Identify a number of areas to be considered for a vision setting process and create a survey instrument - IN PROCESS
• Conduct a SAB/MAB survey to poll their opinions on future directions and priorities 
• Analyze and report findings, organize follow up discussions
• 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
• Hire a part-time person (or assign this role to an existing staff) to work with us in coordinating the planning activities
• Receive recommendations from the MAB IT subgroup about hosting a meeting with experts to consider arXiv's current infrastructure and workflows  

January-March 2016:

• Start the 2016 annual fund raising campaign with the goal of increasing annual contributions (MAB subgroup will come up with recommendations)
• Plan, test, conduct a user survey 
• Host IT external consultants to advise us on future directions
• 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
• 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

April 2016-June 2016

• Analyze findings - prepare proposals and white papers for consideration
• Develop scenarios, work plans, etc.
• Plan an August workshop (in conjunction with MAB/SAB annual meeting)

August  2016

• 25th anniversary workshop to discuss the future of arXiv based on proposals that will be shared in advance 
  
  • Goals: engaging different stakeholders in a conversation about arXiv's future

September-November 2016

• 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 would like your input on what sorts of services arXiv should be providing. Our primary goal here is getting feedback on "what arXiv should be doing" rather than "how is arXiv doing it.”

 (1) Rapid Dissemination = Time required to process and announce submissions.

 (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.