New Grant and Governance Structure Will Help Support arXiv - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education

“The Cornell University Libraryannounced significant new steps on Tuesday toward its goal of making the online repository arXiv less burdensome to sustain.  The Simons Foundation has awarded Cornell a five-year operating grant to match the fees it gets from arXiv’s member institutions, up to $300,000 a year. And this fall those institutions will elect a member advisory board to help govern the repository. Those steps build off the voluntary membership model Cornell introduced in January 2010,saying it needed to find ways to share the costs of maintaining the repository.  By late 2010, about 85 institutions, including some of the repository’s heaviest users,had pledged support. That number grew to more than 120 institutions last year. This year almost 135 libraries and research laboratories have signed on to support the repository, according to Oya Y. Rieger, associate university librarian and arXiv program director. The library now covers about 15 percent of arXiv’s expenses and has a budget of about $500,000 for the repository, she said.  arXiv is heavily used by researchers in physics, mathematics, computer science, and other fields, who deposit preprints of their published research there. In 2011, according to Cornell’s figures, arXiv had more than 76,000 new submissions and 50 million downloads worldwide. Cornell has hosted arXiv since 2001, when the repository’s founder, Paul Ginsparg, joined the faculty.”