31–39 of 39 posts
I've always wanted to take a swing at re-institutionalizing science as a betting game. It'd be such a good business model for a free preprint server. Best predictor wins! Cheaters punished!
I've always wanted to take a swing at re-institutionalizing science as a betting game. It'd be such a good business model for a free preprint server. Best predictor wins! Cheaters punished!
Could you expand? What exactly do you mean what would people be betting on?
Seems like a job for a peer to peer system if bandwidth is a major expense.
I can't imagine that it is. Let's say a paper is 1 MB, downloading it 1,000 times costs 10 cents at AWS prices. 10,000 lifetime views would be a lot for an arXiv paper, and that is $1. Plus storing 1,000 papers at that rate is another 10 cents a month. Storing a million papers is $100 a month. The thing people miss about AWS's charging for bandwidth is that it's an efficient way to lower their costs handling DMCA req…
TBH 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.
I think the best way to understand the numbers would be to look at the breakdown of costs. Two links that were shared from the twitter thread discussing this might be useful: 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 bu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't imagine that it is. Let's say a paper is 1 MB, downloading it 1,000 times costs 10 cents at AWS prices. 10,000 lifetime views would be a lot for an arXiv paper, and that is $1. Plus storing 1,000 papers at that rate is another 10 cents a month. Storing a million papers is $100 a month. The thing people miss about AWS's charging for bandwidth is that it's an efficient way to lower their costs handling DMCA req…
COS’s platform, the Open Science Framework, hosts large amounts of data in addition to the preprint itself. It’s more of a “scientific workflow platform” than a “preprint service”.
This could indicate that many preprints are posted as standalone artifacts (eg not every preprint would include rich datasets alongside the PDF). In effect, people could be skipping the workflow and just using it for the preprint.
For bandwidth usage, they're estimating 20-25% of site traffic. Hosting costs are not a trivial expense, but they're not the main driver of the budget, and the bigger uncertainty seems to be on labor costs.
This sadly is a common theme for academic databases. Many databases were running on funding money. And after the funding gone, so is the database
Academics should make their databases easily archivable then. One thing I don't like about COS preprint sites is how much they rely on JavaScript. I'm not sure the Wayback Machine can archive them correctly. It might take a specialized bot. The Wayback Machine doesn't work right at all on one of my own COS preprints: https://web.archive.org/web/20200211103826/https://engrxiv.o... Maybe I should contact ArchiveTeam...
The files can be downloaded directly by adding '/download' to the engrxiv URL for each preprint.