EarthArXiv Blog

I'd really like to see the blog have regular contributions as well. I'd think a new post once per month, if not more, would be ideal. I'm happy to add anyone as collaborator to the GitHub repo if you'd like to make a blog post directly. Alternatively, if you're not on GitHub, you can email me the blog text and I'll post it for you. Anyone who's interested please let us know here and we can start thinking about topics and schedules. I've been wanting to write a blog post myself on the initial usage of EarthArXiv. Thanks @ebgoldstein for the push to revisit this.

This is a great idea!

In principle happy to help. I love blogging. Although the more interesting posts would likely be written by people in leadership about the current state/progress, discussions on changes of policies and future plans. I am also @VictorVenema on MS GibHub.

Hi All! I agree this is a very good idea. I can probably tap a couple of folks who've already had positive experiences with EarthArXiv. I'd like to contribute too at some point, as I've also got some views on it's acceptance (or otherwise, at least at this moment) in the community. We'd really need someone to lead on organising this, like a Community Manager. I guess we have no funds to pay anyone yet...:-(

I am happy to help coordinate posts, send nagging erm*.. i mean reminder emails regarding contributing posts, and write a few of my own. I am also equally happy to stand back and let someone else have this role.

I vote we give @ebgoldstein the job! He and I were talking offline and he suggested we use the github repository to manage this. We'd keep a list of ideas and contributors as an ‘issue' in the EarthArXiv github repository, which would be a 1) a public list of the post ideas and authors 2) allow others to openly contribute ideas, and 3) be a means of managing light peer proofreading/review for grammar, spelling, obvious errors, before making the posts live on our website. I'd like to second this idea.

I am just reading a book on lean start-ups to get some idea who to build up my grassroots journals. Also our archive could be seen as an internet start-up, which we need to bring to world-domination to achieve our aims.

A blog would be a good way to get feedback from our users on what we are doing well and were we could improve. It also helps that we are scientists ourselves, but we are probably not very typical.

To see how well we are doing we would not only have a look at the growth rate of the number of manuscripts, but it would also be good to see how much of this growth is due to new people (if small we need more marketing) and how much of the growth is because we have returning users (if small we need to ask them why they did not like what we do). Are these numbers available somewhere, or at least the raw data so that we could compute them?

The number of manuscripts is available. The number of visitors to the submission site is sort of available. COS provides that data monthly to Chris and I. However, they are undergoing changes in how and what they capture so we don't really have consistent data right now. The github page where we host the blog, resources, and FAQ does not have metrics. Although, it would be easy to add something like Google analytics there.

Yes, comparing the number of visitors to our site to the number of uploads would also be informative. Smaller changes may not be too important, the order of magnitude would be: is 10% of the users uploading a manuscript or 1 in a thousand?

My intuition is that this number is very low as the first page on EarthArXiv.org does not provide any information on what we are doing and why. That is likely a spot were we loose a lot of users.

To see how we are doing with new and returning users we would need something like a table with upload dates by user account.

@tomnarock1 will COS provide us with a table of basic stats (list of submissions, corresponding author, date submitted, EarthArXiv DOI, final journal article DOI, abstract, license, etc.) or do we need to do that via API?