Page:Finch Group report.pdf/88

 generally, commercial re-use would allow third parties to harvest published content from repositories and present them on new platforms that would compete with the original publisher.

Costs

7.71. Since most universities in the UK have now established a repository, the costs of so doing may be regarded as sunk, although there will be a continuing need for investment and improvement. A recent estimate of the annual operating costs puts them at between £26,000 and £210,000, depending on the size of the university and its research community. As to subject repositories, the 2012 budget for ArXiv in the physics community is $589,000, and the current cost for the NIH’s administration of PMC is put at $3.5-4.0 m. The annual running costs of UKPMC (excluding the support it receives from the US National Library of Medicine in ingesting articles from publishers) are c£600,000. It is important to note, however, that cost effectiveness depends critically on usage: the numbers of items uploaded into the repository, and downloaded from it. And it has recently been noted that “the limited resources devoted to repository management make it difficult to enhance services” with a detrimental effect on both efficiency and effectiveness. The costs to universities of running fully-effective repositories thus remain unclear.