Popular Preprint Servers Face Closure Because of Money Troubles (nature.com) 13
The rise of preprint repositories has helped scientists worldwide to share results and get feedback quickly. But several platforms that serve researchers in emerging economies are struggling to raise money to stay afloat. One, which hosts research from Indonesia, has decided to close because of this funding shortfall. From a report: INA-Rxiv, which was set up in 2017, was one of the first repositories to host studies from a particular region. Previous platforms served specific disciplines: for example, arXiv, the original preprint repository, hosts physical-sciences research, and bioRxiv is a popular repository for biology studies. Other region or language-specific repositories followed, including ArabiXiv, which hosts Arabic-language research; AfricArxiv and IndiaRxiv. Managers of these repositories say they increase exposure for research from the regions, and facilitate collaborations. INA-Rxiv, ArabiXiv, AfricArxiv and IndiaRxiv are run by volunteers around the world, but the servers are hosted online by the non-profit Center for Open Science (COS), based in Charlottesville, Virginia. The centre's platform hosts 26 repositories, including more than a dozen that are discipline-specific. In December 2018, the COS informed repository managers that from 2020, it would be introducing fees, charged to repository managers, to cover maintenance costs. The charges, which were finalized last December, start at about US$1,000 a year, and increase as repositories' annual submissions grow. The costs can be significant, particularly for repositories run by volunteers in emerging economies.
What are their costs, really? (Score:2)
The Center for Open Science is nice, but their storage costs should be somewhere around 0 if they use S3.
I looked on their site and they have a cost breakdown, but it's unclear what their infrastructure actually is. Are they actually throwing redundant servers into data centers with drives?
I'm not saying the service should cost nothing, but a per-paper submission cost is ridiculous. Once the front-end is done the ongoing cost (besides software maintenance) should be somewhere close to zero.
Anyone from the C
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Based on the article's claims of $230k a year in costs, I'm guessing the majority is probably charged labor.
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Financials are here: https://arxiv.org/about/report... [arxiv.org]
Pretty sure this has nothing to do with hosting costs.
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Never mind that, I guess arXiv is not part of them, sorry about that.
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Hopefully the charitable foundation of one of the big tech companies will quickly step in and fund the whole thing
Why look to "big tech?" They value knowledge for its commercial potential. Only the very naive need to have the many possible ways this could compromise the operation and policies of an "open" system explained to them.
The major universities of the US have endowments measured in billions. They could cover this for hundreds of years and barely notice the expense. What's it all for if not things like this?
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I mean when it comes to research, recognition, and excluding non-traditional sources of information there are probably more people with skin in the game in academia than Tech... tech does value commercial potential which means the results of the research need to actually work.
Schools patent technologies ready for commercial use alongside publishing, tech buys technologies and sometimes helps fund research that is mostly happening at the universities alongside other funding from DARPA and other sources.
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but their storage costs should be somewhere around 0 if they use S3
Their storage costs (for content) should be exactly 0 if they use torrents (for content).
Seriously - they should partner with PirateBay. The reputation of both organizations would improve.
Does this convince people? (Score:2)
The results of fundamental scientific research should be distributed as widely as possible for the advancement of society and those findings should not be hidden behind paywalls whose soul purpose is to generate revenue/profit for those not doing the research. However, for a group as outspoken about open science as COS to say that there are costs associated with hosting research seems to indicate that "there is a there there" when academic publishers and conferences and journals talk about switching to open
Re:Does this convince people? (Score:4, Interesting)
"That is not to say that those publishers, conferences and journals are charging feeds commensurate with their costs. There is no reason why they should be the ones to profit from the distribution of someone else's work"
There is a grey area here. If distribution is not free why should they not profit from providing it? If it requires their time and efforts surely they at least deserve to paid for their labor. In all honesty it is those submitting the work that should be charged and not the readers, if the readers do any kind of commercial work based on the research and it is patented they'll have to pay for the privileged anyway whereas there are benefits to the submitter just for being published. All this amounts to a fairly small fee on a per submission basis... it scales, it likely wouldn't be enough to hinder any real research but would certainly deter spam.
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An interesting article about how to make Open Access more sustainable: What is a sustainable path to open access? [sigplan.org]
$26K+ per year? (Score:2)
Is this only a quarter FTE plus hosting? $26K is well within grant-writing territory. Sounds like a decent cause.
I do presume the researchers who are using it get paid to do research? Correct me if I'm wrong.