4 ms·

Publication and diffusion software can be Free there are a lot of options. Often university libraries even provide them with support for you.

• blagie 5y ago
  They're free only if sysadmin time is free. It's the same rabbit hole. In practice, maintaining, supporting, and running a server, especially with archival-grade backups and retention -- is gonna require more than $50k (let alone $5k) of human time each year. You can't pretend there is no cost or that the cost is an order-of-magnitude lower than it is. At that point, you end up with solutions which can't work. Many people would gladly donate a megabuck a year if a significant portion of science went open as a result. People won't do that if you pretend the annual costs are $5k. Likewise, university libraries fielding that cost is a good solution -- and far cheaper than journals -- but it won't work if you pretend the cost figure is lower than it is.
  • ta988 5y ago
    I said Free as in Free software. Of course there is a cost. But this is nothing compared to the tens of millions of dollars a state university has to pay each publisher each year.