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: sh...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3256 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865