The COS can do a better/smarter fundraising effort than the one they are planning...

+1

Hi All,

Victor: are you referring to the COS-hosted call to all preprint services they host, or the one between the Advisory Board?

Chris

OK. Loomio seems to be less terrible than Gmail in terms of keeping threads together. TBH, I don't really understand how to use either...Anyway, on p3 and 4 of this document are some notes from our Advisory Board meeting: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hdJ2AkIter--Iu6GpP1rMThjLHB_Gv2u1Kx9Y0-LXrI/edit. The first two pages are just some extracts from the COS-generated document on the motivation for, the problems arising from, and potential solutions to needing more funding. This will indeed need more discussion between the Advisory Board and the broader set of Ambassadors/general supporters. Chris

Christopher, thank you for the information.

Do I understand it right that before this announcement there was never any talk of us having to pay for promoting the COS manuscript server in our scientific community?

If that is the case I feel that the behavior of COS is not acceptable. To lure us in with the expectation of a free service, asking dozens of scientists to volunteer their time and to use their networks to make the COS manuscript server a success and only when a large part of the work is done and our reputations are connected with the service to present an enormous bill of 6k€ per year for us and 100k€ in total is not an acceptable way of doing business. They manage to make it even worse by immediately threatening to close down the service if we do not jump.

I am in agreement with Victor. I add: if suddenly a bill is presented together with shutdown threats and I did understand all this really 100% correctly, then I withdraw my papers from EarthArxiv. Moreover, I advise everyone else not to submit to EarthArxiv or be involved in any way.

If this is not a misunderstanding on my part, the business model employed by the hosting organization is sneaky or, at best, simply a plain stupidity. To me, there are no excuses for deception. In the best case that the organization suddenly discovered costs they did not anticipated then we are looking at self-deception.

I added ( modestly that is true) in this (self or busineswise) deception of authors or free science on the web. Being a deceiver is nir my hobby.

There were no real hints as to what was coming, as @tomnarock1 will confirm. However, we are where we are, and we need to think collectively and strategically to come up with a solution. Or at least those who wish to be involved can do so. Some of the language in this thread is very negative at best, and rude as worse, and is clearly not going to help at all.

Hi y'all!
There might be possibilities with programmes funding infrastructure costs, like those in Australia sustaining GPlates for Sidney Uni. As far as I know, these funding programmes have been sustaining developers, computational power and so on for GPlates for more than a decade. I guess someone within the COS wide umbrella is based in Australia and has the possibility for us to apply for this program, or there are similar programmes elsewhere, that I am not aware of.

Hi all - I am sorry that the communication about financing for maintaining the preprint services appeared in any way deceptive or sudden. We had tried to share the steps with the community of services along the way, but I'll consider this feedback as a communication failure on my part.

Our goal is to achieve sustainability of the preprint services using shared infrastructure. To that end, we drafted a sustainability strategy here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pZ3JI9Y-NYgzJgC1VV-r7qLh14hK_XKXHsb4y85km-4/edit Your review and comments are welcome.

Some key points:
1. To date, COS has been able to obtain grants that cover the costs of development and maintenance of all the preprint services. We also have sufficient grants to cover those costs through 2019. To maximize sustainability, we need some help from the community of services. We are engaging the services now to generate a plan that we can succeed with together.
2. The total cost for maintaining the services in 2019 is $148,821. A breakdown of costs is available in the proposal. Our present proposal would cover 72% of those costs from contributions from preprint service communities, with COS continuing to have responsibility for fundraising the rest.
3. COS will always be fundraising and hopes to be successful enough with that to subsidize costs for preprint services that have a gap in their own fundraising success. More detail on all this is in the proposal document.

As reminder, COS is a non-profit charity. The sustainability strategy is not to make money for COS, it is purely to ensure the sustenance of this open community of services. Your ideas for how best to achieve this are most welcome. The document is open for commenting.

And, as a quick comment on the opening idea -- requesting donations. COS does have a continuous fundraising drive for donations from users. This year, we expect to yield somewhere close to $100,000. COS's overall operating costs are $5.8 million in 2018, $3.3 million of that for the technology infrastructure. We expect to continue increasing contributions by individual donations, but it will be a long time before that will cover a significant portion of the maintenance costs. Grants, major gifts, and other sources will continue to be important for sustainability for the known future.

Thanks Brian!

My thoughts on fund development for COS preprint services: Mainly from an EarthArxiv perspective, but also from a history of fund development (I was the development director for the College of Engineering at UCSB for a time).

1. There is no service “community.” Implying that the various named entry points into the COS preprint platform somehow together, or even simply individually, represent a community or communities is just wrong. There is no broad constituency of community “members” out there already to be fund-raising targets. There is no pre-existing organization with its own membership ready to be tapped. In the case of EarthArXiv, one of the logics of its formation is to be external to all other Earth/space science organizations, and so to be a neutral service, so that members from any of them can feel free to contribute their preprints. This means that the Advisory Council for EarthArXiv represents as broad and diverse (in many different ways) a collective as can be assembled across the planet and across the disciplines of Earth/space science. The Advisory Council was chosen at random from a list of people who volunteered on the internet. NONE of them volunteered to be fund raisers.
2. The people who are volunteering to do the work of getting authors to add their papers to the COS platform are already contributing to the success of COS as an open science organization. Without pay, they are making COS a significant player in the preprint arena. These are exactly the wrong people to be told they need to raise X amount of money every year to keep things going. If this proposal becomes policy, I predict EarthArXiv will fail to raise the suggested amounts and that volunteer enthusiasm will plummet (as will the current positive sentiment for COS as a partner). The current preprints sustainability strategy is a real load-pistol-shoot-foot proposal.
3. Asking for more money from entry points that succeed in getting more preprints seems at first look to make sense (there are some costs per preprint); but on reflection is a self-defeating move. COS, we presume, wants these preprint efforts to succeed, and the prime metric for success is the number of preprints. So dampening enthusiasm for adding as many new preprints as possible is counter-productive for COS’s own goals. What are the other metrics? How might other metrics come to the fore in fund development? For example, searches, downloads, alt-metrics, etc… These metrics are important to the users of COS’s preprint platform: the authors!
4. One of the logical groups to ask for ongoing funding is the cohort of authors with content on the COS platform. An annual fund to “pay it forward” is a natural fund development effort here. This puts more effort back on the COS fund development team. But then with some tactical support (e.g., the emails of authors… and some metrics on their preprints), the volunteers at EarthArXiv can certainly help spread the word.
   
5. Tasking the ad-hoc volunteer leaders from the various preprint end-points to meet a fixed fund-raising goal will, over time, underperform tasking all interested open-science supporters to be on the look-out for ways to help COS maintain the preprint effort, including possible new funding from foundations and other somewhat serendipitous fund-raising potentials. In other words, having a plan means your plan either succeeds or fails. And each year it succeeds, you never know if there were other opportunities that this success delayed or obscured. But opening up to the generosity that might happen when authors and volunteers feel energized to help out could lead to far greater success, even perhaps to endowments.