Jonathan Rochkind writes
> Well, anything that requires continual capital resources and staff
> time, requires continual funding or donations/volunteers of some
> kind, right?
Universities spend millions on professors to do research and give it
away for free to toll-gating publishers. They spend millions on
buying access to research from the same publishers. They spend next
to nothing to make that expensively produced research freely
available to all. This madness is not compatible with their own
incentives.
> If you want to be reasonably confident it will still be
> there in X years, you need to be reasonably confident that your
> combination of funding and/or donations (of capital, hardware and
> network etc) and volunteers (staff) continues.
It's been going on economics for 16 years with the RePEc project
I created. There is no reason for it to stop because we have
reached a critical mass.
> Umich found it's own stewardship of OAISter unsustainable.
They could have funded it by cutting subscription. For each
$100 cut is subscription, give $50 to the faculty for travel,
the rest keep for digital library projects. The faculty will
come screaming for more cuts!
> We all know what OCLC's approach to sustainability is. If someone
> else has another one, it would be great if you'd try it out. While
> OCLC got the name recognition of OAISter, they didn't get any
> special rights to harvest the data, you can do it too.
I am already doing it.
Cheers,
Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel
RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
skype: thomaskrichel
Received on Tue Sep 22 2009 - 14:48:54 EDT