As I think we have discussed before, the answer to Miradon's question is as long as a piece of string. In other words, it depends what you mean by an OA repository.
If it is a repository to hold an institute's published output, the costs are comparatively trivial. I have asked IR managers from India what the costs to them were and they replied 'not very much', or 'we used existing resources' or '2 people's salary for helping with deposit/formatting plus new PC ~$6055'. Clearly this needs to be translated into local currencies and to meet different volumes of publications. If on the other hand you are talking about a campus-wide resource containing theses, educational packages, conference presentations and so on, then it's a different ball game and is not what we are focussing on in this forum. It is really important to define what you are talking about when quoting figures as detractors will quote high figures for the all-embracing scenario, whereas the cost of an OA repository, set up to hold an institute's publications, is perfectly affordable by those in economically constrained countries. And it's this that is necessary to enable access to the world's published research and to speed scientific progress. Barbara . ----- Original Message ----- From: "N. Miradon" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, December 07, 2007 5:09 PM Subject: Cost of running an OA repository Does anyone have a good estimate of the real financial cost of running an OA repository? On this list, Hélène Bosc has recently told some of the organisational obstacles in setting up an E-prints repository [1] - but she didnt mention finance as an issue. Also on this list, Dirk Pieper [2] drew attention to the 500th repository listed at BASE [3]. Similarly, Scientific Commons now covers 891 repositories in 51 countries [4]. From these pages one can see which countries are well covered, and hence deduce those which are not well covered. If one were to talk to the laggards, I suppose that some would mention the cost of any repository as a potential problem. It could be useful to have in one's back pocket some robust, and preferably audited, figures for fixed costs and running costs. N.Miradon [1] http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind07&L=american-scientist-open-a ccess-forum&D=1&O=D&F=l&S=&P=113107 [2] http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind07&L=american-scientist-open-a ccess-forum&D=1&O=D&F=l&S=&P=113744 [3] http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind07&L=american-scientist-open-a ccess-forum&D=1&O=D&F=l&S=&P=113744 [4] http://en.scientificcommons.org/repository/overview
