Does anyone have a good estimate of the real financial cost of
running an OA repository?
On this list, Hélène Bosc has recently told some of the
organisational obstacles in setting up an E-prints repository
[1] - but she didnt mention finance as an issue.
Also on this list, Dirk Pieper [2] drew attention to the 500th
repository listed at BASE [3]. Similarly, Scientific Commons
now covers 891 repositories in 51 countries [4]. From these
pages one can see which countries are well covered, and hence
deduce those which are not well covered. If one were to talk to
the laggards, I suppose that some would mention the cost of any
repository as a potential problem.
It could be useful to have in one's back pocket some robust, and
preferably audited, figures for fixed costs and running costs.