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Conference Call: April 15, 8pm EDT (Zhixiong) & April 25, 9:30am EDT

Meeting Notes:

• Zhixiong: the National Science Library (Beijing) has put together a working group (arXiv Service Group). This group is composed of librarians from several different institutions. One goal for the year is to raise awareness of arXiv among researchers (especially in non-physics areas). They would appreciate any promotional material arXiv could provide.
• Zhixiong: another goal of the Service Group is to conduct a survey to discover how arXiv is used by researchers and students, the level of knowledge about arXiv, and what problems researchers may have with using arXiv. This may be of general value to arXiv.

Financial Planning

• We would like to diversity of revenue sources in order to raise additional funds to allow us to expand arXiv's staffing (especially the current minimal IT staffing configuration), lowering the current tier structure to encourage more organizations to become members, and support R&D projects. What are your suggestions?  One of the ideas we would like to discuss is adding a Give button on arXiv home page to invite donations from users (examples). What are the pros and cons of this idea? 
• The purpose of the arXiv reserve fund is to support unexpected expenses to ensure a sound business model. Currently, arXiv has a reserve fund of approximately $100,000 that accumulated during 2010-2011 due to unexpected staff vacancies and other savings (2012 expenses have not been factored in yet). The 2013-2017 budget projections assume that we will be able to add $50,000-$100,000 per year to the reserve funds. We need to develop policies about how contingency funds will be used and how the account will be structured (for instance, funds needed for closing the business versus development funds - also a part of the reserve funds to create an endowment & the interest can be used for reducing membership fees).  Also, we need to determine at what point of reserve fund accumulation (total reserve balance) we will consider to lower the annual membership fees.
• The current annual institutional fees are in the $1,500-$3,000 range, which may be high for some developing countries or institutions that are lower in the use ranking (below 200).  Shall we add a lower fee to encourage these institutions to support arXiv?
• Some of our members feel that it makes sense to increase the annual fee for the top users as the current model does not appear fair (see the usage chart).  What do you think? Should we add a higher top tier pricing for the organizations that are listed high in the use list?

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