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….”

arXiv Announces New Policy on ChatGPT and Similar Tools

The recent release of AI technology that generates new text has raised serious questions among the research community. For one, “Can ChatGPT be named an author of a research paper?”

The resounding answer from arXiv leaders and advisors is, “No.” A computer program cannot, for example, take responsibility for the contents of a paper. Nor can it agree to arXiv’s terms and conditions. Other organizations agree.

A framework for improving the accessibility of research papers on arXiv.org

Abstract:  The research content hosted by arXiv is not fully accessible to everyone due to disabilities and other barriers. This matters because a significant proportion of people have reading and visual disabilities, it is important to our community that arXiv is as open as possible, and if science is to advance, we need wide and diverse participation. In addition, we have mandates to become accessible, and accessible content benefits everyone. In this paper, we will describe the accessibility problems with research, review current mitigations (and explain why they aren’t sufficient), and share the results of our user research with scientists and accessibility experts. Finally, we will present arXiv’s proposed next step towards more open science: offering HTML alongside existing PDF and TeX formats. An accessible HTML version of this paper is also available at https://info.arxiv.org/about/accessibility_research_report.html 

Access is not the same as accessibility: A framework for making research papers truly open – arXiv.org blog

“arXiv has pioneered open access for more than 30 years by removing financial, institutional, and geographic barriers to research. No paywalls or fees, no login required for reading. This approach – which gives researchers maximum control over the release of their results and broad visibility – transformed the research process and launched the open access movement.

However, access is not the same as accessibility, which is the practice of ensuring access regardless of disability. The vast majority of research papers posted to any journal or platform do not meet basic accessibility standards.

In 2022, arXiv completed intensive user research with over 40 people to determine the extent of the problem, evaluate current mitigation efforts, and consider solutions. This work, informed by arXiv staff, accessibility experts, and arXiv readers and authors who use assistive technology, is posted on arXiv in PDF and HTML formats (arXivID: 2212.07286).

In extensive interviews, our research participants shared that finding research, reading it, preparing documents, and submitting work are all steps in the research process where people encounter barriers. In particular, interpreting math equations, figures, and charts is problematic.

Flexible content can help address these issues. Offering well-formatted HTML, alongside PDF and TeX source, will lead to critical accessibility gains. arXiv’s collaboration with ar5iv, which currently renders HTML for approximately 70% of arXiv papers, is a first step in this process. Next, we expect to reduce the error rate and add a link to HTML on arXiv abstract pages….”

New program director joins arXiv staff | arXiv.org blog

“arXiv is pleased to welcome Stephanie Orphan as program director.

Orphan brings extensive business development, operations expertise, and relationship management experience to the role of program director. She joins arXiv from Portico, a not-for-profit digital preservation service. As director of content preservation and publisher relations there, she ensured ongoing growth and sustainability by engaging with Open Access publishers, university presses, national libraries, and other organizations around the world. She also served on the board of directors of the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association and is an active member of the Society for Scholarly Publishing.

At arXiv, Orphan’s role spans administrative management, operational oversight, and implementation of arXiv’s short- and long-term strategic goals. She also serves as a liaison between arXiv, its advisors, and the international open access community. …”

Panel: Trends in Peer Review of Open Access Preprints

“Speed of research is a major feature of open access preprint platforms like arXiv – formal peer review can follow later after rapid distribution of results. However, as submissions to arXiv and other preprint servers have grown, many researchers are seeking new avenues for community feedback and peer review. At this panel discussion”, leaders in preprints and peer review will discuss current trends in virtual overlay journals, open peer reviews, and more.

 

Individual Award 2021 – Paul Ginsparg – Einstein Foundation Berlin

“Preprints have been shared in the physics community since the early 1950s but mostly among well established professors. Physicist Paul Ginsparg, who receives the Einstein Foundation’s Individual Award, set out to democratize access to scientific results. Today, his preprint server arXiv has spread to many other fields—and made science progress more efficient and fairer….”

Anti-Big Bang theory scientists face censorship by international journals- The New Indian Express

“Twenty-four astronomers and physicists from 10 countries including reputed astrophysicist Jayant V Narlikar of Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics ®, Prof Sisir Roy of National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) and Prof Amitabha Ghosh of Indian National Science Academy (INSA) ® from India are among the scientists protesting the censorship of papers that are critical of the Big Bang hypothesis by the open pre-print website arXiv….”

Professor Ramin Zabih named arXiv faculty director | arXiv.org blog

“arXiv, the world’s leading open access research sharing platform, is pleased to welcome Professor Ramin Zabih as faculty director.

Zabih is a computer science professor at Cornell Tech and president and founder of the Computer Vision Foundation (CVF). His research focuses on computer vision and its applications, especially in medical imaging. He trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, and he has authored or coauthored more than 265 papers that have been cited more than 32,000 times….”