Great, I'm glad you're already doing it. If you can bring your project
to the scope of OAIster, and add some improvemetns, I'll certainly use it.
But we all know how we'd LIKE universities to behave, but none of us are
in charge of universities.
If you can count on university funding, that's certainly one way to be
sustainable. The folks managing OAISter didn't have that. You can blame
the University Regents if you like. But it doesn't mean that
sustainability isn't a valid thing.
What are we arguing about?
And Thomas, what's going to happen to your project when you retire, get
laid off, or unexpectedly become unable to work upon it? Can I base my
own services on it knowing that it's reasonably likely to continue if
one of those things happens?
Jonathan
Thomas Krichel wrote:
> 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 - 14:58:08 EDT