Arthur Sale wrote:
> Back of envelope engineering-style estimate (ie very rough):
I think you need a new envelope :-) The total is out by 3 orders
of magnitude.
>
>
> Assume 25,000 research journals worldwide, 10 articles per issue, 4 issues
> per year, each article = 200kB on average. Total = 200 x 109, 0.2 PB
> (Peta-bytes) annually.
1,000,000 articles of 200 Kbyte is about 200 Gbyte, not 0.2 Pbyte.
Although I suspect 200 Kbyte may underestimate average article size if my
recollections of PubMedCentral data are correct (article sizes in 1 - 5
Mbyte
range.) That still only gets us to a Tbyte or 2.
But as others have said, research data swamps the articles.
> Even more crudely, double to allow for all theses, conference articles and
> books = 0.4 PB annually.
>
>
>
> The academic+research world is a small contributor to the quantity of
> 'information' on the Internet. It takes too much time to generate each item!
> Now if we were asking about quality... But then we would have to address the
> question of the missing quality information (ie non-OA) as well.
>
>
>
> Arthur Sale
>
>
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