Add a new organization to ROR: arXiv

[ror-curator-bot]

Summary of request: Add a new organization to ROR

Name of organization: arXiv Website: https://arxiv.org Domains: Link to publications: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2212.07286 Organization type: Nonprofit (A non-profit and non-governmental organization involved in conducting or funding research) Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv Wikidata ID: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q118398 ISNI ID: GRID ID: Crossref Funder ID: Aliases: None Labels: Acronym/abbreviation: arXiv Related organizations: Cornell University City: Ithaca Country: United States Geonames ID: Year established: 1991 How will a ROR ID for this organization be used? To identify affiliations for research publications, To be integrated in a scholarly publishing system

Other information about this request: I will also add bioRxiv and medRxiv if this request is deemed in bounds.

[adambuttrick]

arXiv is a project of Cornell University and does not appear to have any other form of organizational status (e.g. as a non profit). The same is true of bioRxiv and medRxiv. Under these circumstances, we would not typically add, and in fact ROR itself does not have a ROR ID for the same reason. Flagging for second review to confirm

[arthurpsmith]

Hmm, this is an interesting case. I think you're right that it doesn't have a separate organizational status. However it does have a lot of the trappings of a nonprofit organization with staff, bylaws, various boards, a donation process, etc. Also the fact that the organization moved from one parent (Los Alamos) to another (Cornell, and now Cornell Tech if that's considered separate) suggests a level of independent continuance. And in some ways it seems a lot like a publisher, which we have added regularly. Maybe closer to a university press? On the other hand maybe it should be considered closer to a journal, which we wouldn't add in itself (rather the publisher of the journal).

If we had actual examples of arXiv staff using it as an affiliation it would be clearer to me - the example publication in this request seems to be from (mostly?) arXiv staff, but doesn't actually list any affiliation on the PDF... As usual with borderline cases this could be argued for either way. If we do add this then we probably should also add bioRxiv, medRxiv, chemRxiv etc. Anyway, I'm inclined to support adding this, but willing to abide by other opinions here.

[ssmulyan]

It seems to me that there's a broad distinction between a platform or repository and the organization responsible for maintaining it. Sometimes they happen to have the same name (e.g. Silverchair or SSRN) and sometimes the organization has a distinct name from the platform/repository (Atypon's Literatum or Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's bioRxiv), which sort of muddies things.

It's not totally clear to me which of those scenarios arXiv falls under.

I have the sense with preprint repositories generally, that the repository basically refers to the content itself and the platform it's hosted on, but not to the organization managing that content or platform, so therefore they're not in scope for ROR by default.

But all the organizational bureaucracy (bylaws, board, etc.) suggests that arXiv may be an independent organization that manages the arXiv repository. It think comes down to how much of that bureaucracy is necessary to push it over the line? I would definitely be swayed by affiliation usage.

[katiecorker]

This recent paper has staff using arXiv as the affiliation: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.08954