Leaving COS

Good. A very diplomatic letter. I found it impossible that COS lured us into a free services and then once locked in started asking for moon prices.

From building up a new peer review system, I have some experience with webhosting and WordPress programming. If those skills are useful do let me know.

Agreed. Nicely phrased. I'm keeping an eye on the socials to see what, if any, reaction there is to this. Whether people think this is the end for EarthArXiv/preprints, or simply an evolutionary step we can take advantage of.

Thanks Tom/All,

It’s already been tweeted about a couple of times, so I guess we may as well get involved in the discussion…

Chris

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Professor Christopher Aiden-Lee Jackson (he/him)

Equinor Professor of Basin Analysis

Basins Research Group (BRG ( http://www.basinsresearchgroup.com/ ))

Department of Earth Science & Engineering

Imperial College

Prince Consort Road

LONDON

SW7 2BP

UK

Email: [email protected] ( [email protected] )

Web: www.imperial.ac.uk/people/c.jackson ( http://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/c.jackson )

Twitter: @seis_matters

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Co-founder of EarthArXiv ( https://eartharxiv.org/ ), a preprint server and postprint archive for the Earth Sciences

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My working day may not be your working day. Please do not feel obliged to reply to this email outside of your normal working hours.

Hi all,

Very nice, soft letter. After it was published in GitHub, we received some tweets commenting on it. So, I eventually thought it was important to take a proactive approach, and show it openly via twitter to inform our followers.

It is nice to see that our community is highly involved and eager to help and share their thoughts. We have now been approached by Figshare via a private message and some followers have come forward with some options on where we could continue hosting preprints. Would it be an idea to forward these ideas and messages to Tnarok for collection?

I believe it is important to move forward with posting several continuous tweets were we positively present the moving to another host and diminish any ambiguity and hesitation amongst our followers.

Do you think this the sensible way forward? Please, let me know your thoughts.

Have a good rest of the weekend,

David

I think it would be helpful to collate these messages, just to give us ideas moving forward

I agree on the need for continued messaging about what the change in hosting means for people thinking of submitting (or that have submitted) to EarthArXiv. The re-hosting raises a bunch of questions, particularly if someone is already worried about the legitimacy of preprints (e.g. does this mean that preprints are going to disappear during the move? what about links to supplemental materials? will updating of old preprints with new versions after re-hosting be possible or will "ownership" be lost? is EarthArXiv going to keep re-hosting every couple of years? and basically is it a "safe" place for long-term sharing of work?). There might not be answers to all possible questions, but being proactive in anticipating, soliciting and answering questions might be helpful.

The preprints have a doi, so also when the URL of the preprints changes the links are not dead.

If we move the existing preprints to another platform it will be hard to keep it possible to update them. At least doing that automatically would require an identity check with COS to ensure someone has the right to update. We do not have that many preprints yet and the number to be updated is smaller, so a moderator could also approve newer versions.

I would personally argue that COS offering a preprint service has the duty to keep on hosting the existing preprints (and any updates of them).

I agree. I'm going to start a new Loomio thread to collate all our options. Feel free to post there or forward to me and I'll upload it to Loomio.

I received a follow up email from the Nature reporter. There's a request to clarify points we made in our letter to COS. Here's exactly what they'd like to know:

• Why did the EarthArXiv leadership find the COS funding model problematic?

• Could you elaborate on how the fee structure proposed by COS hinders growing servers?

• Which preprint groups would be most damaged by the fee structure and why?

• Did Eartharxiv try to raise the funds requested by the COS?

• Did the COS decision to change its funding model come at a surprise?

• How do you propose that the costs of running a preprint are covered?

• What has the response been among the Eartharxiv community to the announcement?

How does everyone feel about replying? Is answering these questions going against our original decision to not comment? Do you think I should reply? Should we start a Google Doc and collectively work through the replies?

We don't have any obligation to answer these questions. You could say we are not commenting further at this point. We are still working with COS on the 6 month extension.