Popular preprint servers face closure because of money troubles

Preprints cost (projected vs actuals): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1V0vKrf50K667CqM3e4S2...

Org finances: https://cos.io/about/our-finances/

A few things stand out: 1. Preprints are pretty new. You're not just hosting PDFs on an s3 bucket in maintenance mode- you're also wrangling authors with very different workflows to use your platform. This means building tools for moderation or retraction, and long handholding to recruit 26 partner groups, some of them started as grassroots efforts without their own institutional history. Each group may have their own ideas about governance. (each research field may do things in different ways)

2. In that light, the projected personnel costs are.... not high. The spreadsheet claims that 22% of page traffic going to preprints, but the original 2019 forecast called for ~$7k budget on developers + QA, total. At market rates, that's... a small fraction of the annual cost of a single developer? (their team page lists 10-15 devs on staff)

3. Compared to the overall organizational finances, it suggests that if anything, some of the cost of running the service is being spread across their other offerings. The original vs modified forecasts for 2019 seem a bit, well, different- it's likely that the costs are still being worked out, and may be dependent on hard-to-predict growth.

It's also very notable that this hubbub seems to involve a relatively small amount of cash: the proposed funding model is a 60-40 split, with the service share divided among up to 26 groups. That says a lot about the role of building institutions to support preprints long term, and the need to help grassroots initiatives mature if we want to keep these services active.

https://cos.io/our-products/osf-preprints/ "...this fee structure accounts for $87,976 in contributions by the preprint services toward maintenance costs (38% of total)"

Disclaimer: I don't speak for any of the groups involved in this process, and comments are based only on these public documents. There may well be other numbers or context.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=preprint+server+site%3Anature.com&... for example lists many previous publications by Nature on the topic, including https://www.nature.com/articles/nmeth.3831 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-00950-5 and https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00199-6 . (The first was not in the flagship journal "Nature" but a sister journal.)

In short, a preprint is a version of a scientific paper before it's been formally accepted by a journal. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preprint .

The first real electronic preprint repository is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv . That gives more background information on the topic.

abought describes some of the differences between a set-of-files and a preprint repository at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22319686 .