Popular preprint servers face closure because of money troubles
1–10 of 39 posts
Re: Popular preprint servers face closure because of money troubles
#2This sadly is a common theme for academic databases. Many databases were running on funding money. And after the funding gone, so is the database
Re: Popular preprint servers face closure because of money troubles
#3Even arXiv has struggled at times.
Elsevier has a sustainable business because they force university libraries to pay big $$$. The big $$$ can be fed back into sales, lobbying politicians, and other activities that leave enough money that the executives behind it can get paid big $$$.
Academic databases might cost 1/1000 as much to run as commercial journals, but then there isn't any surplus they can use to get rents.
Re: Popular preprint servers face closure because of money troubles
#4TBH the numbers seem exceptionally high to me. Is there something I'm missing?
Hosting a few thousand PDF files that are probably only downloaded by a handful of people shouldn't cost thousands of dollars.
Re: Popular preprint servers face closure because of money troubles
#5TBH the numbers seem exceptionally high to me. Is there something I'm missing? Hosting a few thousand PDF files that are probably only downloaded by a handful of people shouldn't cost thousands of dollars.
maybe move from AWS to good-old VPS/small business hosting?
Re: Popular preprint servers face closure because of money troubles
#6Even arXiv has struggled at times. Elsevier has a sustainable business because they force university libraries to pay big $$$. The big $$$ can be fed back into sales, lobbying politicians, and other activities that leave enough money that the executives behind it can get paid big $$$. Academic databases might cost 1/1000 as much to run as commercial journals, but then there isn't any surplus they can use to get rents…
When was was the last time the arXiv was actually at risk of not having enough money?
Re: Popular preprint servers face closure because of money troubles
#7Seems like a job for a peer to peer system if bandwidth is a major expense.
Re: Popular preprint servers face closure because of money troubles
#8The one preprint site that I use which is hosted by the COS seems to be doing okay, fortunately: https://blog.engrxiv.org/financials/
Re: Popular preprint servers face closure because of money troubles
#9I still don't understand stand the point of the regional repositories. How does this "increase exposure" for their research, and if it did why would that be valuable?
Re: Popular preprint servers face closure because of money troubles
#10TBH the numbers seem exceptionally high to me. Is there something I'm missing? Hosting a few thousand PDF files that are probably only downloaded by a handful of people shouldn't cost thousands of dollars.
It's not that hard to host PDF files in the short term, but over the long term you have to do maintenance, and that adds up over time.
For an operation like that you are going need at least one technical FTE, you will be more comfortable with two. (Somebody can go on vacation)
You probably also need one or two FTE for "customer service" functions (e.g. I can't upload file X, I am having trouble downloading file Y)
If you are getting organizations to subscribe to this you also have to run a sales organization, not just to get new customers, but simply to keep getting checks from the customers you have. You need at least one FTE for that, but sales organizations usually develop a hierarchy to the extent that you might have one senior FTE and two junior FTEs.
Then you need somebody to scramble for grants, interface with non-customers, so you get an FTE for administration.
So that gets you to 8 FTE and a wage bill upwards of $500,000 a year. If you had everyone working at full capacity it might be efficient, but if your sales efforts don't get you to full capacity this is a boondoggle.
arXiv.org got started because Paul Ginsparg wasn't concerned about cost recovery at the beginning (no sales), did it as a labor of love, got some people to help him with it as a side project, so it cost at most 2 FTE to run.
Once it got to Cornell it developed a cost structure in line with what I described except the sales and grant-getting functions were neglected so the investment in people to make it sustainable in the beginning still wasn't enough.