Self-hosted repository costs — 58-96% staff; MIT DSpace ~$260K/yr; Southampton ePrints £116K/yr

Across the repository budgets studied, staff costs account for 58% to 96% of total (S-0088).

• MIT DSpace: ~$260,000/year ($76K infrastructure + $184K staffing for 2.75 FTE).
• University of Southampton ePrints: ~£116,000/year, 96% of which goes to staff.

The technology is inexpensive; the expertise to curate, maintain, and govern a repository is the substantial expense. Hosted-storage alternatives are cheaper still: AWS S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval ~$48/TB/year, Glacier Deep Archive ~$12/TB/year, Google Cloud Archive ~$14/TB/year (S-0089).

The case structures the §7 cost picture: at all four tiers (Tier 0 through Tier 3), the marginal storage cost is small; the structural cost is staffing and governance. The Tier 3 architectural argument does not eliminate that cost — it changes its character. Volunteer-staffed deployments at TU Dortmund, TU Dresden, and MIT SIPB demonstrate that the staffing requirements scale down dramatically when the operational model shifts from custodial repository management to protocol participation.