Re: Estimates on data and cost per department for institutional Archives?

From: Steve Hitchcock <sh94r_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2004 21:44:06 +0000

At 22:12 10/01/04 +0000, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>Self-archiving costs per article are
>negligible. (The extra keystrokes are truly not worth discussing.) Please
>adduce evidence to the contrary if you disagree. The 100+ institutions
>that have set up one $1000 linux box and installed the free GNU Eprints
>software on it are not fretting about the cost per paper.

At 23:19 10/01/04 +0000, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>The cost of archiving is trivial and it is a waste of time to even mention it.

Who is this trying to convince? I wonder if this is becoming
counter-productive. If you ask for nothing you will get nothing. It's a bad
idea to begin an activity within an enterprise on the basis that it has no
costs, or none that merit mention, especially an activity that needs to be
at least usable and sustainable, and, when it is established properly, will
become critical to authors, users and institutions. Why bother otherwise?

It would be better to get some real costs into the open. There are enough
archives out there now to be able to treat this with more rigour. Then the
paymasters and others can decide whether the costs are 'negligible' or
'trivial'. If there is serious - let me introduce another subjective term -
money available for institutional archiving, then perhaps it will be taken
more seriously by a wider group of people?

Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3256 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865
Received on Mon Jan 12 2004 - 21:44:06 GMT