{"id":4380,"date":"2009-12-31T14:03:57","date_gmt":"2009-12-31T14:03:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2009\/12\/31\/paying-for-free-stuff-is-a-sol\/"},"modified":"2009-12-31T14:03:57","modified_gmt":"2009-12-31T14:03:57","slug":"paying-for-free-stuff-is-a-sol","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2009\/12\/31\/paying-for-free-stuff-is-a-sol\/","title":{"rendered":"Paying For Free Stuff Is a Solved Problem, Isn’t It?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of days ago, the LHC Blog asked about the future funding<\/a> of the arxiv pre-print server<\/a>, currently hosted at Cornell. Cornell is looking to get some external funding, though:<\/p>\n

\n

Currently the plan is to ask the “heaviest user institutions” (other university library systems) to voluntarily contribute to support arXiv operational costs. The FAQ states that the library has already secured commitments from 11 of the 20 institutions that make the most use of the arXiv. (I’ve seen an unofficial list; these include many of the ‘big name research institutes’ around the world.) In return, besides academic karma, these institutions will be recognized for their support with arXiv banners and would possibly be privy to more detailed arXiv usage statistics. The target appears to have such contributions support a fraction of the operating budget. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I dunno. I would’ve thought the solution was obvious. After all, countless blogs and websites give away their content for free– this is a solved problem. All you need to do is to add Google ads to the arxiv template. That way, everybody looking for physics pre-prints can see the same pseudo-relevant stuff I get every time I read a message in GMail…<\/p>\n

Given the amount of traffic the arxiv gets, they ought to be able to get a pretty good rate. The real question is whether they should charge a flat rate per ad, or use a sliding scale based on the authors (increase by a factor of two for each Nobel laureate in the author list, etc.). They’re smart people, though. I’m sure they’ll be able to find the most effective way to allocate the ad space…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of days ago, the LHC Blog asked about the future funding of the arxiv pre-print server, currently hosted at Cornell. Cornell is looking to get some external funding, though: Currently the plan is to ask the “heaviest user institutions” (other university library systems) to voluntarily contribute to support arXiv operational costs. The FAQ… Continue reading Paying For Free Stuff Is a Solved Problem, Isn’t It?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,22,7,140,11,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-funding","category-physics","category-publishing","category-science","category-silliness","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4380\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}