Re: Estimates on data and cost per department for institutionalarchives?

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Min-Yen Kan wrote:

> At the National University of Singapore, a task force has assembled
> to examine the possibility of setting up an open-access institutional
> repository [for]
> >   5. (RES) self-archiving institutional research output (preprints,
> >    postprints and theses)
> >   http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3210.html
> >   http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2837.html
> 
> we are currently trying to estimate the amount of data that will
> eventually flow into the institutional archive. It's hoped that it will
> give us a way to estimate the cost of the budget for the project.

I leave it to the administrators of the existing institutional archives
for RES (e.g., the larger ones among the 113 in
http://software.eprints.org/archives.php or the 243 in
http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ ) to reply about costs. I just
wish to point out one crucial omission in the question:

Cost is very low, and the cost per-paper will obviously be lower the more
papers are archived. But how many papers are archived in turn depends on
something completely different from the question of archive cost, namely,
whether or not the institution has a successful and effective policy for
ensuring that the RES archive is filled!
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/archpolnew.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0022.gif

There are many institutional archives intended for RES that are sitting
out there still near-empty for lack of an institutional archive-filling
policy. There is not much to be learned from finding out what that costs
to do! If I were planning to set up institutional archives for RES I would
devote far more effort to finding out how to fill them (and then to
filling them). If nothing else, that would give a far better idea of the
per-paper cost to expect. The cost-data from some of the larger existing
archives will help estimate this figure. Reckon into it also the cost
per-paper of implementing an effective institutional archive-filling
policy! http://eprints.st-andrews.ac.uk/proxy_archive.html

Stevan Harnad