Digital Publishing: “The Running Costs of eLife 2.0” (Continuum Platform)

From a eLife Labs Blog Post by Paul Shannon, Head of Technology

Continuum is the platform that powers eLife 2.0. The first question I’m often asked is: “how much does it cost?”. The short answer: “it’s free”. Continuum is available as free open-source software and licenced under an MIT licence, meaning that you can use it as you wish, even for commercial purposes. However, like any software, even though its ticket price may be zero, there are still running, maintenance and people costs involved.
The more granular nature of the services in Continuum means that costs can be easily broken down with regard to the scale, diversity and needs of any publisher. There are three main aspects to the costs of running eLife 2.0 on Continuum: the cost of the computers (or instances) that run the software, the cost of the bandwidth that people use to access those computers and the cost of the people used to ensure those computers work as expected 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
In common with other systems, Continuum also needs to be set up and adapted to every publisher’s needs to allow them to do more with everything they publish – there are options for both internal development teams and for using a digital agency for that.

Read the Complete Blog Post (approx. 2000 words) + Charts
See Also: eLife Launching New Open-Source Tool For Publishing Named Continuum (April 15, 2016)

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