ADS Charging Policy Update

Catherine Hardman
Collections Development Manager

Over the last few months we have undertaken a review of the ADS charging policy. This is in response to two recent events.

In Issue 20 we included the news that the AHRC had decided not to renew its core funding of the AHDS from March 2008. The ADS has subsequently established its own ongoing relationship with the AHRC: continuing to give advice to those in Higher Education intending to submit a grant application to the AHRC, providing technical advice and an archival home for the digital outputs of AHRC funded projects. While our relationship with the AHRC fundamentally remains the same in terms of the service we provide for AHRC applicants and grant holders, there is a shift in our relationship with other higher education funding bodies. The second factor in changing the charging policy is related to the recommendations of the Big Data report which has recently been completed. During the course of this project we spent some time looking at the real costs of the storage and ongoing refreshment of digital data (http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/project/bigdata/).

This has meant that the charging policy has changed in a few key areas:

1. The type of institution which is now subject to the charging policy.
2. A large proportion of the costs are based on the number and complexity of files, but these are now 'banded'.
3. The costs for storage and refreshment of data have decreased per megabyte.

The new charging policy came into effect for all quotations and new negotiations undertaken by the ADS from 1st January 2008. The policy can be found at: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/project/userinfo/charging.html