Funding for government-funded archival projects tends to begin with a bang but gradually fall through the cracks due to the project becoming politically unexcit

Funding for government-funded archival projects tends to begin with a bang but gradually fall through the cracks due to the project becoming politically unexciting, frequently with all data just completely lost one day with no warning, so I’d be disinclined to trust any such initiative. The French government made an attempt with HAL[1], but given how INRIA just unceremoniously deleted the software repository Gforge with no backups or redirects (and broke every GCC build out there, because the GCC dependency ISL was hosted on it[2]), I’m not sure it’ll survive once the nationalistic fervor is exhausted. Besides, a country-specific repository seems to be strictly worse than a country-neutral one. On the other hand, PubMed exists. My guess is, for a preprint archive, network effects are paramount, and ArXiv was there first. It’s not directly a government project, but is still funded by US government grants and hosted by Stanford (now that the international mirror network is shut down, which does give me a slightly jittery feeling). [1] https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ [2] https://groups.google.com/g/isl-development/c/JGaMo2VUu_8 https://groups.google.com/g/isl-development/c/JGaMo2VUu_8