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.
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
