On Mon, 12 Jan 2004, Steve Hitchcock wrote: > 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." > > > > "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?
Creating and maintaining eprint archives is trivial, and the cost is not worth talking about. What is worth talking about (and productive) is *filling* those archives, but that too requires only a systematic *policy*, not significant funding: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/archpolnew.html http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/ http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/UKSTC.htm The best guarantor that the contents of institutional open-access eprint archives will be maintained and sustained is that they are first filled. > 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? If something serious is going to be put into institutional self-archiving, then let that be serious effort in filling the archives. That means (1) clearly informing researchers of the impact-maximising benefits of open access and the impact-minimising costs of access-denial; and it means (2) implementing a policy of monitoring and rewarding both open-access provision and the enhanced research impact it generates. In other words, a natural extension of existing "publish or perish" policy to "provide open access to your peer-reviewed journal publications so as to maximise their research impact." There would be no harm in asking the existing 100+ eprints.org archives http://software.eprints.org/archives.php what their costs are per-paper (stressing that you want to know not only the actual costs for their mostly near-empty archives -- which will of course be higher per-paper than for filled ones -- but also the estimated costs per-paper when their archives contain all their annual institutional refereed-research paper output). What my colleague Steve Hitchcock seems to be missing is that Iain Smith http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3391.html was unwittingly equating archiving charges with the current total cost per article (c. $1500), and my answer was completely accurate: Relative to *that* figure, the few dollars per-paper that self-archiving costs annually are negligible. That the cost per paper is a few dollars per year we already know from the Physics Arxiv since 1991: http://www.arxiv.org "papers are normally posted within a day of submission, and Ginsparg estimates that the cost is less than $10 per paper" http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/neuro/journal/v6/n5/full/nn0503-433.html It's fine to ask for the corresponding data from institutional archives too, but the fundamental point -- which is that the cost is at least two orders of magnitude less that $1500 per paper -- is rock-solid and needs to be known understand (as is the fact that comparing per-article archiving costs with per-article publication costs is like comparing apples with oranges -- or rather, comparing unplanted apple-seeds with orange-crates). Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum: To join the Forum: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: [email protected] Hypermail Archive: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy: BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
