On 16/09/2009, at 21:19 , Kevin Ashley wrote:
> 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.
And will increasingly do so. In fact, I can see a day when the size of
the entire journal literature will be a rounding error on the total
size of all research outputs. In some disciplines we are there already.
>> 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
>>
>>
> --
> Kevin Ashley | The road to wisdom? Well,
> it's plain
> Head of Digital Archives | and simple to express
> ULCC http://dablog.ulcc.ac.uk/ | Err and err and err again
> but less and less and less --
> Piet Hein
Great thinker! I still have set of his Soma cubes [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_cube
] on my bookshelf.
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