Preprint hosting requirements and priorities discussion

It could be better if the host does not rely on commercial cloud services for the platform, but has already made a commitment to running their own servers. This would mean that the preprints are just a minor load on existing capacity. Again, preprints are tiny, compared with data.

What is the approx expected bandwidth per day?

Here's another issue. We hope to build the volume of new preprints and of researchers downloading preprints over time. Let's say we start with 1000 new preprints a year, and 10 times that number of people grabbing these (or more?). In five years, we will want to have 3-4 times that number of new preprints, and 10-20 times the number of downloads. (I could be conservative on these numbers).

Hi all. Thank you for inviting me in to this conversation. Many important points. We have a similar consideration with the INArxiv. And we would go with local Indonesian server hosted by National Research Institute (LIPI), rin.lipi.go.id. It's still a long way to go, but we had some glonal discussions, and they are interested to contribute.

Did you notice that AfricaXiv had an agreement with ScienceOpen. I did not have the details yet, but next week I will have a chat with Jo Haveman the founder of AfricaXiv.

One reason to not choose a common preprint server (like Zenodo or Figshare) may be to enhance the number of services and build a more diverse ecosystem of providers. This article from a while back is a good start for this idea <https://thewinnower.com/papers/4172-a-healthy-research-ecosystem-diversity-by-design>.

From the AC: "maybe we should request a way to put submissions we are discussing like this on hold/flagged."

Just to chime in with my perspective (as one of the AC moderators), the problem we have been having is that right now if there are issues with a preprint that don't fulfill our moderation policy, which is posted on our github but all authors do not seem to read, we have to 'reject' the preprint, send them a link to the moderation policy and the authors re-uploaded a new version or fix the metadata etc. Whatever system we choose, it would be helpful to have a sort of hold/flagged category that the AC moderators are looking at so that we can more quickly work with the authors to fix the submission and thus reduce the time from submission to the server to the preprint being fully posted on EarthArXiv.

Is my guess right that what goes wrong most often are requirements people do not expect?

Such as printing on the first page the that the manuscript is not peer reviewed (it is a pre-prints server after all). Or printing the name of the journal one is submitting to (does not have to be decided yet, one may try multiple ones and why should we force people to submit to journals?).

If that is what makes the work, that would be an additional reason to reconsider these rules.

It is a pre-print but also a post-print server. The disclaimer is necessary, it is good to know if you are reading a non-submitted pre-print. A pre-print already submitted and under review. A pre-print that has been accepted and already includes corrections and modifications from peer review... Maybe we should make this rules more visible, for example in the submission page, or literally asking to fill a simple form that fills that page. But I think it is absolutely necessary.