| It's not that hard to host PDF files in the short term, but over the long term you have to do maintenance, and that adds up over time. For an operation like that you are going need at least one technical FTE, you will be more comfortable with two. (Somebody can go on vacation) You probably also need one or two FTE for "customer service" functions (e.g. I can't upload file X, I am having trouble downloading file Y) If you are getting organizations to subscribe to this you also have to run a sales organization, not just to get new customers, but simply to keep getting checks from the customers you have. You need at least one FTE for that, but sales organizations usually develop a hierarchy to the extent that you might have one senior FTE and two junior FTEs. Then you need somebody to scramble for grants, interface with non-customers, so you get an FTE for administration. So that gets you to 8 FTE and a wage bill upwards of $500,000 a year. If you had everyone working at full capacity it might be efficient, but if your sales efforts don't get you to full capacity this is a boondoggle. arXiv.org got started because Paul Ginsparg wasn't concerned about cost recovery at the beginning (no sales), did it as a labor of love, got some people to help him with it as a side project, so it cost at most 2 FTE to run. Once it got to Cornell it developed a cost structure in line with what I described except the sales and grant-getting functions were neglected so the investment in people to make it sustainable in the beginning still wasn't enough. |