Page History

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Items are listed in approximate priority order but this may be adjusted based on ongoing discussions with the Scientific and Member Advisory Boards. Effort estimate total is 80w (~1.5FTE).

Add automatic hold-on-submit based on flags from classifier - There are some flags from the classifier (such as line numbers, two copies) that should result in a submission going straight to the hold status for admin action when submitted. Moderators should not get any notification of such submissions until admins have had a change to resolve obvious technical issues.

Add ORCID author identifier support - We would like to support ORCID identifiers for better interoperability with other repositories implementing authority control and also as a route toward providing institutional statistics for member organizations (because ORCID has implemented storage of affiliation identifiers in the profile data). ORCID identifiers will be associated with arXiv user accounts via the ORCID OAuth process.  Completed.

Improve moderator web interface, add personal checkbox - We want to encourage moderator use of the web interface to streamline their workflow. The moderator web interface was significantly extended and improved in 2014. Work will improve clarity based on the feedback we have received and provide each moderator with the ability to mark submissions as checked.

Ingest data from discontinued Data Conservancy pilot - The Data Conservancy pilot that ran from 2010 through 2013 has been discontinued and Johns Hopkins are going to shut down the pilot repository. In order to preserve access to datasets uploaded with over 600 articles we need to pull the Data Conservancy data into arXiv as ancillary files (see http://arxiv.org/help/data_conservancy and http://blogs.cornell.edu/dsps/2013/06/14/arxiv-data-conservancy-pilot/).

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.

Develop and integrate internal automatic overlap detection for new submissions - Develop pipeline for checking of new submissions against existing corpus and staged submissions. Develop warnings for administrators and moderators based on overlap check results. Make these warnings available for administrators and moderators.

Add ORCID author identifier support - We would like to support ORCID identifiers for better interoperability with other repositories implementing authority control and also as a route toward providing institutional statistics for member organizations (ORCID has implemented storage of affiliation identifiers in the profile data). ORCID identifiers will be associated with arXiv user accounts via the ORCID OAuth process.

Category 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.

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 put effort into updating our TeX installation, improving our packaging so that it can more easily be deployed and updated, and 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 - We have been gradually replacing old PHP/Tapir code with more maintainable and better integrated Perl/Catalyst code.

Replace and improve email alert system - Replace the email alert system to allow easy subscribe/unsubscribe via web interface tied to user accounts, ensure scalability and allow customization.

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. Also, we have discontinued the Data Conservancy pilot and plan to pull the DC data in as ancillary files (see http://arxiv.org/help/data_conservancy and http://blogs.cornell.edu/dsps/2013/06/14/arxiv-data-conservancy-pilot/).

Develop and integrate internal instance of classifier code - We should integrate the classifier code into the arXiv production system rather than using API to code running on Paul Ginsparg's research machine. This was agreed by the SAB on 2013-09.

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. We should have regular ingest of all arXiv content into a separate archival system and propose using CULAR (Cornell University Library Archival Repository). Work is require to script creation of submission packages (SIPs) for initial ingest and regular incremental updates.

Add metadata fields for funding information, article status and migration of old content - There have been several requests for support for additional metadata. These include work to add funding information (requests from supporting members), for the ability to store version information (author manuscript, publisher version, etc.), and for publication information of migrated content (mainly for conference proceedings in computer science). 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. It may well be appropriate to generalize our models/code in some placesWork was postponed in summer 2014 to allow quick initial deployment and to allow Paul Ginsparg time to tidy his code. There are uncertainties here because we haven't seen Paul's code and perhaps when we do we will want to rewrite some of the client-side code to reflect that understanding.

User Support and Moderation

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