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From Cornell University:

As arXiv celebrates its 25th year as one of the scientific community’s most important means of communication, the site’s leadership is looking ahead to ensure it remains indispensable, robust and financially sustainable. While nearly 95 percent of respondents said they were satisfied with arXiv, many said they would like to see improvements that would make the site easier to use, without changing its essential format. “We were amazed and heartened by the outpouring of responses representing users from a variety of countries, age groups and career stages. Their insight will help us as we refine a compelling and coherent vision for arXiv’s future,” said Oya Rieger, Cornell University Library associate university librarian for digital scholarship and preservation programs, andarXiv’s program director. “We’re continuing to explore current and emerging user needs and priorities. We hope to secure funding to revamp the service’s infrastructure and ensure that it will continue to serve as an important scientific venue for facilitating rapid dissemination of papers, which is arXiv’s core goal.” The full survey report can be found here.

Highlights From the Report

Most respondents to the survey cautioned against changes such as allowing users to rank papers or comment on them, fearing that turning arXiv into a social-media site could erode its quality. One respondent wrote: “Do not make arXiv into a social-media platform or something complicated. Keep working on improving your core, which is what we use and love!” Improving the search function emerged as a top priority, as the users expressed a great deal of frustration with the limited search capabilities currently available. “I really think the search engine would be the best place to focus – time-ranking and basic keyword search aren’t really enough for the complexity and diversity of search terms in technical papers,” a user wrote. Regardless of their subject area, users were in agreement about the importance of continuing to implement quality control measures, such as checking for text overlap. Users also expressed strong interest in better support for submitting and linking research data, code, slides and other materials associated with papers.“arXiv is a wonderfully simple and elegant tool,” one respondent commented. “I think the best path forward is one which improves the service by making the kind of tweaks that enhance what it already does without significantly changing the way users interact with the website.”

New Services

Users were asked to rate a range of proposed new services for arXiv. In the ranked responses, more than 63% of users rated adding direct links to papers in the references (reference extraction) as very important/important. Citation export in formats such as BibTex, RIS was rated as very important/important by more than 57% of users, and extraction for the BibTeX entry for the arXiv citation was similarly rated by more than 55% of respondents. Citation analysis tools in general were ranked as very important/important by almost 53% of respondents.

Finding

The vast majority of arXiv’s users access the papers directly from the homepage (79%), followed by using Google to search (50%) and Google Scholar (35%).

The full survey report can be found here.