The arXiv blog has a new home and a new RSS feed. 

We are pleased to announce that Steinn Sigurdsson has assumed the Scientific Director position. He will collaborate with the arXiv Program Director (Oya Y. Rieger) in overseeing the service and work with arXiv staff and the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) in providing intellectual leadership for the operation. This is a part-time appointment as he will be working remotely from Penn State, retaining his faculty position, with occasional visits to Cornell. Steinn’s key responsibilities include:

• Provide intellectual and scientific leadership by serving as facilitator of the SAB, which acts as an advisory board in setting policies and criteria for submission, moderation and administration, in collaboration with the SAB chair;
• Serve as the final arbiter for complex moderation decisions (e.g., when moderators disagree or if there is an author dispute);
• Contribute to strategic planning process representing the scientific communities served by arXiv, including serving on the steering committee of the next generation arXiv (arXiv-NG);
• Participate in setting system development (IT) priorities with a focus on submission and moderation processes and arXiv-NG;
• Work closely with the SAB members and subject advisory committees to ensure smooth moderation processes, such as assisting them in recruiting moderators;

arXiv’s organization chart can be found at: OrgChart2017

Steinn is currently a Professor of Astrophysics at the Pennsylvania State University at University Park.  He did his doctorate in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. He then worked as a researcher at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and  the Institute of Astronomy and King’s College at Cambridge University in England. Steinn is a member of the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos and the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, and the Penn State Astrobiology Research Center. He works on a range of topics in astrophysics and related areas, ranging from cosmology, large scale dynamics and black holes, to formation and evolution of planets, and the prospects for discovering non-terrestrial life. He has been a member of the board of the Aspen Center for Physics since 2010 and is currently a Trustee of the Aspen Center for Physics. 

We are very excited to welcome Steinn to our team!

We’re pleased to be conducting our first arXiv-nextgen user poll. The arXiv team is working on extracting and presenting article references on the abstract page. We'd like to know how you'd like them to be presented to you. You can express your preference by taking a very short survey: https://cornell.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_cCmPDAqvlgadsln.

The survey will be available until 24:00, Wednesday, September 13.

Thank you for helping us improve arXiv!

arXiv received $322,000 from the Heising-Simons Foundation to contribute to the arXiv-NG initiative, which aims to modernize arXiv's infrastructure and consider new models for the service’s sustainability. The grant from the Heising-Simons Foundation, which follows a $450,000 grant from the Sloan Foundation, will help fund the creation of a scalable, cost-efficient, and reliable infrastructure for the site, which currently relies on aging legacy code. The arXiv-NG initiative, which began in January 2017, is expected to take 2-3 years, during which time the site will remain robust and reliable. 

The arXiv team is gathering information on the use of arXiv the API and content in external applications and for research. We are doing so in order to inform the development of new arXiv APIs and to minimize disruption to current users of the arXiv API and arXiv content. If you use the arXiv API or otherwise access arXiv content in a programmatic way, we invite you to take a short survey. You may also sign up (via the survey) to provide input and receive news of changes as we proceed with API development.