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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. 

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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 about 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 priority as priorities by the SAB.

How will we fund expensive development initiatives?

We have not developed a strategy yet.

The 2013 arXiv roadmap is 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 requirmentsrequirements.

Should they 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 at 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 external 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 and will assess to see how this model is working.  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 subgrouparXiv subgroups' s 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 maybe avoid some of those if, for instance arXiv instance, arXiv is consider a " repository " of choice for government mandates.

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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 support 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: Esther, Yuri, Philip

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