It would be helpful if those operating OA archives
would post detailed cost figures, counting volunteer labor
as if it had to be paid for. I'm thinking not of multi-purpose IRs
but OA archives, such as e-lis and dlist
(though even these have other material)
Is there an OA archive that does only that function?
Those I know also include reports and papers not
necessarily intended to be published, at least not in
that form.
Paradoxically, it might be easier to persuade some
university administrations to spend the larger amount
for a multi-purpose IR than the much smaller amount
for OA by itself. It may not be rational, but administrators
might have other priorities in funding than the OA we
care about.
Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman_at_liu.edu
-----Original Message-----
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum on behalf of Stevan Harnad
Sent: Sat 5/28/2005 1:18 PM
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_listserver.sigmaxi.org
Subject: JISC Open Access FAQ
...
I agree with Peter that this is a useful document. I would add only that the
cost estimate -- "Initial start-up costs of around £80k might be expected,
followed by an annual cost of about £40k to cover recurrent costs such as staff
(including overheads), equipment and software" -- is *not* for just an OA
archive, which can be created and maintained for far, far less:
http://www.arl.org/sparc/pubs/enews/aug01.html#6
The much higher estimate is for an Institutional Repository intended to
do a lot of other things for an institution over and above providing
Open Access to its journal article output. All those other things are
fine, and desirable, but it is misleading and a mistake to call their
price tag the price tag for providing OA! It makes it seem that providing
OA to 100% of an institution's self-archived journal article output
would be an order of magnitude more costly than it really is!
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2837.html
With OA already long overdue, and research impact (and impact
income!) still being needlessly lost daily, monthly, yearly, this is
not the time to give the incorrect impression that an institution cannot
provide 100% OA unless it is ready to pay£80k down and£40k recurrent! If
they do that, then they get a lot more than OA for their money, but if
they are not ready or able to do that, they can still have 100% OA for
a lot less money (under a tenth of those estimates)!
Stevan Harnad
Received on Sun May 29 2005 - 11:53:59 BST