Yet another reason -- apart from focus and urgency and immediate benefits
-- for modularizing institutional archiving needs and efforts, and
focusing on an immediate OA-specific solution for OA content (journal
articles) is that it is cheap, fast and simple (unlike a Digital Omnibus
Archive). Here are some recent estimates in pounds (for dollars, multiply
by 2) from the new Eprints Wiki:
http://wiki.eprints.org/w/How_much_will_it_cost%3F
How much will it cost?
Estimating how much an eprints archive costs...
Basically the problem is that (so far) many archives are set up as
a personal mission of a single person, who devotes spare time to it
a research project side-effect. That is the funding is to set up an
eprints archive and then do research based on it.
The main cost of setting up is staff time which is very hard to
calculate but I would suggest as a minimum:
£1000 - Good PC
£0 - Software - it's all free, although getting Redhat Enterprise is
probably worth the small cost.
£1000 - per/year backup provision and network connectivity (wild
guess!)
Staff time: I am assuming:
Little or no quality checking performed by a human being on data being
submitted
The UNIX admin already knows how to run apache, perl, redhat linux,
XML etc.
The archive will run an (almost) default configuration of EPrints. The
default is suitable for a university archive.
Setup: One week of skilled admin time to get a machine installed with
redhat linux, the required libraries installed, eprints installed and
an archive set up with minimal customisations (maybe a new webpage
£1000
Per Record: Once someone learns the basics, adding an eprint
is about 15 minutes work [1], so cost depends on "value" of
staff member doing the deposit.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/
UK Estimate: ~ £8
Most people ignore the cost-per-record as it's absorbed by many
peoples time.
Also usually the staff costs will be increased by many many many
meetings. The above is a theoretical minimum, assuming they just
mostly take the default options.
CalTech Review and Cost Estimate (2001) [2]
http://www.arl.org/sparc/pubs/enews/aug01.html#6
Received on Sun Mar 12 2006 - 02:25:41 GMT