Alternatives to COS

Hi All! I hope you're well. Just re-emerging from an intensive teaching block! I just had a quick chat with Maggie Simmons, Publications Manager for the Geological Society of London (GSL). She heard about EarthArXiv leaving COS and wanted to know how, if at all, GSL could help/get involved. They can't do platform development, etc, but they could offer some sort of support/endorsement. I'm currently not sure if any of this could be financial, but we're meeting on Feb 26th to discuss further. Hope this is OK. Thanks, chris

I recently had a chat with Ubiquity Press. They are an open access publisher based in the UK. They currently operate a set of open access journals and university presses. They have developed an open source 100% cloud-hosted publishing system that they'd like to adapt to preprints. They'd like EarthArXiv to consider using this as our next platform. They are really interested in getting into the preprint game and would host EarthArxiv for free; although, they would prefer to work with us on a donation-based model to offset some of the costs and cover engineer time for feature updates.

Just like Chris did with GSL, I'm posting here to keep everyone up to date on the conversations that are happening

Nature has written a piece about COS and the closing repositories.

Popular preprint servers face closure because of money troubles

Brian Nosek, executive director of the COS, says the centre decided to introduce fees so that it could sustain its hosting service in the long term, which will cost about US$230,000 in 2020.

I know that house prices in SF are high, but where do they get such numbers from for such a simple service?

Irawan plans to use the closure of INA-Rxiv as an opportunity to develop an Indonesian platform to host repositories, similar to the one run by the COS.

Coding a repository from scratch likely costs a fraction of Silicon Valley prices.

We are only mentioned on the side:

Another, EarthArXiv, will leave COS's platform because of the fees. In a letter posted on the site on 21 January, the repository’s advisory council said it would move to another platform that offered long-term financial security. The council described the COS’s new business model as especially damaging to groups serving under-represented and financially challenged communities.

Dear all.

Thank you Victor for raising this news in conversation. We from INArxiv agreed to answer an interview by Nature.

In the past week, INArxiv has also held conversations with Juan and his team from PKP regarding OJS preprint (we call it the OJS-p). PKP is trying to release OJS-p later this month. We have also communicated with the LIPI's (Indonesian Science Institute/ a gov't organization) technical team who have agreed to host INArxiv-X as a preprint server along with 200 OJS ver3-based journals. Apparently they have been communicating long enough with PKP to develop OJS cloud.

For INArxiv itself, we ourselves have used the pre-moderation mode and rejected 90% of documents uploaded since February 1, 2020. In all campaigns, we use the term "INArxiv is hibernating". We are waiting for the number of documents to be quite low and stable, while continuing to work on setting up the INArxiv-X server with LIPI.

I forgot an important point.

But Nosek acknowledges that repositories run in emerging economies are most likely to struggle to raise funds. The centre will be flexible about when groups pay this year’s fees, but if no money is received, the services will be frozen so that they are no longer able to accept new submissions, he says.

People we worrying whether the old preprints would be lost or whether it would no longer be possible to update them. That does not seem to be the case. That also makes finding a new home easier because transferring the old preprints would have been a large part of the work, for which we would thus at least have all the time we would need.

Dear all. I got 3 offers so far: Brian Hole from the Ubiquity Press (I think it's similar to the one discussed above), Jason Berkeloo from Knowbella, and Martyn Rittman from preprints.org (MDPI).

That's good news @Dasapta Erwin Irawan. I'm interested to follow how things work out for you. Yes, Brian is who we talked to at Ubiquity. He gave an interesting demo. Have you also looked at PKP?

I took a note during our chat last week with Juan Alperin and PKP Team.

I'm not a part of EarthArxiv, but I am the director of engrXiv so I'm trying to follow what's going on here closely. I will say that I'm particularly interested in the upcoming offering from PKP. I am partial to an open source solution that can be hosted on my own server and provide greater control. Of course there are downsides to that as well. I would personally be on the hook for maintenance and repairs. I would also have to register to be able to assign DOIs and pay for that ability. Would probably be looking at $2-3k per year in expenses assuming I could administer it myself (for free).

That is certainly a concern and something we've been discussing as well. My understanding is that several universities and some libraries are already using PKP. We are exploring partnership options that would enable the use of existing infrastructure. As you've probably seen, some of the COS systems are interested in collaborating, which could also help with maintenance and fees.