How much will it cost?

Estimating how much an eprints archive costs...

Basically the problem is that (so far) many archives are set up as

1. a personal misson of a single person, who devotes spare time to it
2. a research project side-effect. That is the funding is to set up an eprints archive and then do research based on it.

The main cost of setting up is staff time which is very hard to calculate but I would suggest as a minimum:

• £1000 - Good PC
• £0 - Software - it's all free, although getting Redhat Enterprise is probably worth the small cost.
• £1000 - per/year backup provision and network connectivity (wild guess!)

Staff time: I am assuming:

• Little or no quality checking performed by a human being on data being submitted
• The UNIX admin already knows how to run apache, perl, redhat linux, XML etc.
• The archive will run an (almost) default configuration of EPrints. The default is suitable for a university archive.

Setup: One week of skilled admin time to get a machine installed with redhat linux, the required libraries installed, eprints installed and an archive set up with minimal customisations (maybe a new webpage template and some fields removed). UK Estimate: ~£1000

Per Record: Once someone learns the basics, adding an eprint is about 15 minutes work, so cost depends on "value" of staff member doing the deposit. UK Estimate: ~£8

Most people ignore the cost-per-record as it's absorbed by many peoples time.

Also usually the staff costs will be increased by many many many meetings. The above is a theoretical minimum, assuming they just mostly take the default options.

See Also

CalTech Review and Cost Estimate (2001) [1]