arXiv sets new record for monthly submissions – arXiv blog

“Since its founding in 1991, arXiv has been growing exponentially – and in October, we hit a new milestone! arXiv has tracked the number of new submissions we receive every month from our very first submission in August 1991, and we share our monthly submission data on our stats page (which houses lots of interesting break downs of the data).

In the month of October of 2023, there were a total of 20,710 new submissions to arXiv, beating the previous monthly record from May 2023. This past May is when we first broke the 20,000 marker for number of submissions received in a single month. This brings arXiv’s overall total submission count, from August 1991 to today, to 2,358,545!

The three subjects with the most submissions in October 2023 were computer science, math, and physics – there were over 15,000 new submissions to arXiv in those subject areas alone.”

Research repository arXiv receives $10M for upgrades | Cornell Chronicle

“Cornell Tech has announced a total of more than $10 million in gifts and grants from the Simons Foundation and the National Science Foundation, respectively, to support arXiv, a free distribution service and open-access archive for scholarly articles.

The funding will allow the growing repository with more than 2 million articles to migrate to the cloud and modernize its code to ensure reliability, fault tolerance and accessibility for researchers….”

arXiv Production Editor

“Reporting to the arXiv Head of Content & User Support, the arXiv Production Editor will manage the manuscript submission, validation, and screening process, in addition to supporting author, reader, and moderator user groups. This is a fast-paced environment with 700-1,400 new papers per day being processed. 

Interpret arXiv policy for editorial style standards and interact with subject moderators worldwide as part of screening manuscripts for scholarly standards
Evaluate manuscripts to ensure that submission files and metadata meet copyright, technical, and other validation criteria
Edit submitted and posted manuscripts for accuracy, format, citations, and other elements to meet evolving arXiv policies
Monitor submitted manuscripts for tone and follow related policies to ensure content adheres to arXiv standards  
Communicate with authors about submission revisions, submission rejections, account issues, and author bibliographies
Process author appeals of editorial decisions with the Section Editorial Committees
Model and support a culture of diversity, equity, inclusion, and wellbeing and continually seek to understand how your role, behaviors, and actions impact the success of this culture 
Coordinate with team members on daily service obligations and long-term editorial process improvement projects 
Collaborate with team to maintain, update, and expand documentation and public facing author help pages 
At times the position may supervise one or more student assistants
Collect and share feedback from authors and moderator on their needs and document potential service improvements…”

arXiv.org is experiencing a DDOS attack – arXiv blog

“arXiv users may be experiencing email disruption due to a DDOS attack. Over the past few days, a small number of users issued over a million email change requests.

These requests originated from over 200 IP addresses – almost all owned by an ISP for a particular province in China. The confirmation emails for this volume of requests overwhelmed our email service. As a result, many arXiv users may not have received their daily emails. And other users may not have received their confirmation emails for registering accounts, or legitimate email change requests.

We are taking measures to mitigate this attack, including temporarily blocking certain IP ranges. Unfortunately, this may mean some legitimate users will be unable to access arXiv until this issue is resolved. We will shortly be reaching out to the abuse desk of the affected ISP for assistance….”

PreprintResolver: Improving Citation Quality by Resolving Published Versions of ArXiv Preprints using Literature Databases

Abstract:  The growing impact of preprint servers enables the rapid sharing of time-sensitive research. Likewise, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish high-quality, peer-reviewed research from preprints. Although preprints are often later published in peer-reviewed journals, this information is often missing from preprint servers. To overcome this problem, the PreprintResolver was developed, which uses four literature databases (DBLP, SemanticScholar, OpenAlex, and CrossRef / CrossCite) to identify preprint-publication pairs for the arXiv preprint server. The target audience focuses on, but is not limited to inexperienced researchers and students, especially from the field of computer science. The tool is based on a fuzzy matching of author surnames, titles, and DOIs. Experiments were performed on a sample of 1,000 arXiv-preprints from the research field of computer science and without any publication information. With 77.94 %, computer science is highly affected by missing publication information in arXiv. The results show that the PreprintResolver was able to resolve 603 out of 1,000 (60.3 %) arXiv-preprints from the research field of computer science and without any publication information. All four literature databases contributed to the final result. In a manual validation, a random sample of 100 resolved preprints was checked. For all preprints, at least one result is plausible. For nine preprints, more than one result was identified, three of which are partially invalid. In conclusion the PreprintResolver is suitable for individual, manually reviewed requests, but less suitable for bulk requests. The PreprintResolver tool (this https URL, Available from 2023-08-01) and source code (this https URL, Accessed: 2023-07-19) is available online.

Scholarship should be open, inclusive and slow | by Emily M. Bender | Sep, 2023 | Medium

“arXiv is a cancer that promotes the dissemination of junk “science” in a format that is indistinguishable from real publications. And promotes the hectic “can’t keep up” + “anything older than 6 months is irrelevant” CS culture….

As a result [of the controversy over the tweet above], I thought I should take some time to lay out my thoughts on peer review and access to scholarly publishing, in a format that has more room for nuance….

Scholarship should be open: The results of scientific and other scholarly work should be accessible to the broad public, and not locked up behind paywalls. This is important for both the goal of scholarship (often publicly funded) benefiting society and the goal of research communities becoming more diverse.

Scholarship should be inclusive: A diverse research community does better research because it benefits from more perspectives AND no one should be prevented from participating in the research they want to do because of racism, sexism, ableism, classism, xenophobia, etc. (We are a long way from achieving this goal.)

A third value I think is less widely held, but it is important to me and I hope many others:

Scholarship should be slow: We engage in science and other scholarship to learn about our world and to serve our communities. In the best cases, we develop and substantiate new ideas firmly rooted in what has gone before and our new ideas respond to and uplift human values….”

Introducing arXiv’s new governance model – arXiv blog

“In early 2022, arXiv embarked on a plan to reorganize its governance. We are happy to report that arXiv leadership, with significant input from its advisory board members, has finalized a new governance model. 

New Bylaws went into effect on July 1, 2023. As part of the governance restructuring, the Member Advisory Board and the Scientific Advisory Board were retired, and three new Advisory Councils were created:

Editorial Advisory Council (EAC)—The Editorial Advisory Council acts as the editorial board of arXiv. It organizes and monitors moderation of arXiv content. The former Subject Advisory Committees have been renamed Section Editorial Committees, and the chairs (also known as editors) of these committees are the regular members of the Editorial Advisory Council.
Institutions Advisory Council (IAC)—The Institutions Advisory Council represents the scholarly communications community and advises on topics such as issues related to publishing, standards, open access and open science; issues related to the arXiv membership program and policy; arXiv services, interoperability and advocacy to the community; user needs, metadata, technical and user trends, and other issues guiding the sustainability and success of arXiv. Institutions Advisory Council members must be affiliated with an arXiv member organization.
Science Advisory Council (SAC)—The Science Advisory Council represents the scientific and research community of arXiv by advising on topics such as intellectual impact and relevance of arXiv, including aspects of significant expansions, high-level issues of standards, expansion in new fields/sections, novelties and changes in the production and dissemination of scholarly works, and impact across disciplines. Science Advisory Council members should be active researchers, be tenured or in a position with similar seniority/stability, be recognized experts in their field, and have had a leadership position and/or successful experience in advisory committees….”

A Year of Jxiv – Warming the Preprints Stone

“But alongside the growth of field-focused repositories, more recently there has been a trend towards developing preprint repositories that cater to communities associated with a particular country or language group. And while scholarship is often said to be borderless, as with real estate, when it comes to preprint servers, increasingly it’s location, location, location….

However, for all their potential benefits, regional and national repositories sometimes suffer from low uptake by the communities they serve and can struggle to secure sufficient funding to cover even modest infrastructure and administrative costs. They therefore typically operate on a shoestring, frequently relying on the efforts of volunteers who, no matter how well-intentioned and industrious, are placed in the invidious position of having to balance their commitment to the repository with competing demands of full-time academic and institutional roles. Such pressures can prove unsustainable, and in recent years have sadly claimed repositories serving the Arabic and francophone language communities, as well as that supporting researchers in Indonesia. IndiaRXiv, the repository launched in 2019 with the aim of boosting science research on the subcontinent, was forced to pull down the shutters temporarily in 2020 but has since reopened with a new hosting partner….

Although to many observers outside of Japan, the appearance of Jxiv was rather sudden, the idea of a Japanese national repository had actually been mooted for some time. However, the initiative gained renewed impetus with the outbreak of COVID-19, according to Ritsuko Nakajima, Director of the Department for Information Infrastructure at JST. “Whilst preprinting expanded rapidly in the early stages of the pandemic, the number of preprints coming out of Japan was relatively small and this concerned us,” Nakajima stated, noting that in an analysis provided by the National Institute for Science and Technology Policy (NISTEP), a leading national research institute charged with providing information and other support for the policy-making process, showed that Japan ranked only 13th in the world in terms of the number of COVID-19 related preprints in 2020. Given that Japan ranked 7th in the number of scientific papers published by any country in the same year, something seemed amiss. “The question then arose of whether a dedicated venue where researchers could post their findings in Japanese or English would help speed up the dissemination of research results within the community” she adds. This was felt to be especially important for encouraging researchers working in commercial environments who, unlike their counterparts in academia, are much less likely to create primary research products such as work reports in English….”

arXiv is Hiring!

“We are looking for a community engagement manager, a few good developers, a program manager, a tech writer/documentation specialist and more.

arXiv is part of Cornell University. All arXiv employees are Cornell University employees.
The positions listed on this page are all full time staff positions with benefits (endowed).
Visa sponsorship is not available for these positions.
Unless otherwise stated, these are 3-year renewable appointments
arXiv is headquartered at the Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City. There is a strong preference for candidates who can report to work at that location, but there are options for hybrid remote work.

We are presently looking for Software Developers, a Project Manager, and a Community Engagement Manager….”

Community Engagement Manager, arXiv,

“Responsibilities of the Community Engagement Manager primarily fall into three areas.

 

Manage Organization Communications (50%):

Serve as a creative communications strategist, leveraging emerging communications trends, research, and techniques to connect to key audiences and stakeholders around the globe; develop campaigns to support arXiv’s mission, vision, project goals, and brand identity.
Act as public relations point of contact for arXiv and engage with key stakeholders, such as journalists, media, and other academic institutions.
Assure exceptional integrity, quality and accuracy in communications; manage content creation for marketing materials (collateral, newsletters, press releases, digital content, social media and more).
Organize, schedule, and manage digital events, including webinars and workshops.
Develop annual reports for leadership groups, including arXiv Members, arXiv advisory committees, and Cornell stewardship.
Develop internal communications strategy to support staff in carrying out arXiv’s mission, vision, and project goals.
Coordinate with Cornell University’s communications team (within the Division of University Relations) to ensure alignment with university-wide media relations, branding and related communications protocols.

 

Manage Membership and Sponsorship (40%):

Develop, manage, and maintain successful relationships with arXiv stakeholders in academic libraries and library consortia, professional societies, research institutes, and other mission-aligned organizations to ensure a thriving membership and sponsorship program.
Develop a communication strategy and benefit package to maintain engagement with members, affiliates, and sponsors.
Cultivate relationships through in-person meetings, webinars, and other outreach and develop marketing materials.
Organize and supervise the invoicing workflow throughout the year to ensure timely payment from all members, sponsors and affiliates; liaise with colleagues across Cornell as needed for financial reporting.
Respond to current and prospective member inquiries regarding membership benefits, membership agreements, and usage data.

 

Fundraising Support (10%):

Organize and implement giving campaigns to solicit support from individual arXiv users.
Assist with grant writing and reporting….”

arXiv OSTP memorandum response – arXiv info

“Funding Agencies can expedite public access to research results through the distribution of electronic preprints of results in open repositories, in particular existing preprint distribution servers such as arXiv,2 bioRxiv,3 and medRxiv.4 Distribution of preprints of research results enables rapid and free accessibility of the findings worldwide, circumventing publication delays of months, or, in some cases, years. Rapid circulation of research results expedites scientific discourse, shortens the cycle of discovery and accelerates the pace of discovery.5

Distribution of research findings by preprints, combined with curation of the archive of submissions, provides universal access for both authors and readers in perpetuity. Authors can provide updated versions of the research, including “as accepted,” with the repositories openly tracking the progress of the revision of results through the scientific process. Public access to the corpus of machine readable research manuscripts provides innovative channels for discovery and additional knowledge generation, including links to the data behind the research, open software tools, and supplemental information provided by authors.

Preprint repositories support a growing and innovative ecosystem for discovery and evaluation of research results, including tools for improved accessibility and research summaries. Experiments in open review and crowdsourced commenting can be layered over preprint repositories, providing constructive feedback and alternative models to the increasingly archaic process of anonymous peer review….”

New arXivLabs integrations provide insights into the academic “influence” of researchers and enable reproducibility through access to data and code – arXiv blog

“arXivLabs, a framework for enabling the arXiv community to contribute to arXiv, continues to grow. We recently rolled out two new integrations—DagsHub and Influence Flower—to provide our users with access to data, code, and other materials underlying research and present a map of influence for individual articles on arXiv, respectively.

Through its web platform based on open source tools, DagsHub provides a central location where projects can be hosted, discovered, and collaborated on. Projects related to arXiv papers will contain the papers’ code, data, models, and experiments allowing them to be fully reproducible. Readers can find DagsHub content on arXiv.org by clicking on the “Code, Data, Media” tab on an article’s abstract page and then activating DagsHub….”

How do we make accessible research papers a reality? – arXiv blog

“When researchers with disabilities, such as blindness or dyslexia, cannot access the research papers in their field, can we really call it “open” science?

On April 17th, arXiv will be hosting a half-day online forum for everyone invested in making research outputs accessible to every researcher, regardless of disability. The forum will center the experiences of academic researchers who face barriers to accessing and reading papers, and will be useful for people across the authoring and publishing ecosystem. We hope you will join us. Together, we can chart a path towards fully accessible research papers, and leave with practical next steps for our own organizations….”

Forum: How do we make accessible research papers a reality?

“Hosted by arXiv, this half-day online forum will center the experiences of academic researchers with disabilities who face barriers to accessing and reading papers. The forum will be useful for people across the academic publishing pipeline who are committed to accessibility and want to collaborate on solutions. Together, we can chart a path towards fully accessible research papers, and leave with practical next steps for our own organizations….”