Friends:
This message on the cost of setting up and running institutional open access archives from Franck Laloe should reach Ms Ann Okerson (who thinks that the costs of OA archives or institutional repositories are hughe) and readers of her Serials article. Les Carr's idea of having authentic data on costing of such repositories is excellent.
Arun
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On 26 Mar 2005, at 15:14, Franck Laloe wrote:
"We now have a goood experience of this question at CCSD, since we have run an archive for the CNRS (a French research institution) for a few years. Actually, the cost of running an archive is not much; one salary is needed to pay someone to check that the documents which are uploaded are OK for the archive; the price of the buyiung and manitaining the hardware is comparable or less.
What costs more money, on the other hand, is to write new software. We constantly improve ours (it is now significantly different from ArXiv, although it remains compatible with it), and we pay three engineers for this. I would say that for a whole (medium size) country like France, a centralized system for all disciplins would cost about 10 salaries; this is of course an extremely small fraction of the research budget of the country."
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This is very interesting and important information. Would you be able to give an indication of the kinds of changes that you have had to build on the base software (I assume from your message that you began with arxiv)? With all of these systems, the devil (and the expense) is in the details, but the precise details differ from one situation to another. It would be a terrific insight to have an Institutional Repository costing data-point at the National end of the spectrum!
Les Carr
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