Membership

SCTA Membership Categories

  • Friend of the SCTA (Simple donation)
    • Simple donation, anyone should be able to quickly and seamlessly contribute a small amount of money $1, $5, etc.
    • Donate Here
    • Benefits
      • Names of the Friends of the SCTA will be listed and thanked on the SCTA website.
  • Member
    • Individual Membership can be purchased for $20 a year.
    • Benefits:
      • Discount on conference/Meeting Fees
  • Supporting Contributor (Individual)
    • Supporting Contributor fees function like Open Access Subvention fees or Article Processing Charge (APC), and therefore vary depending on the length and complexity of contributions.
    • A standard subvention would be roughly $500 per 100 pages of traditional printed text.
    • Rates are variable and subject to negotiation and approval of the SCTA community
    • Benefits:
      • Automatic membership status
      • Privileged Technology Support
  • Supporting Contributor (Group)
    • Supporting Contributor (Groups) function like Open Access Subvention fees or Article Processing Charge (APC) usually supported or requested through a large grant or collaborative project
    • A standard subvention would be roughly $500 per 100 pages of traditional printed text. Or a negotiable fee of $4,000 dollars (rate negotiable/adjusted according to the size of the grant and project) for every year of the lifetime of the grant.
    • Rates are variable and subject to negotiation and approval of the SCTA community
    • Benefits:
      • Automatic membership status for all members of project team during life cycle of grant.
      • Voting rights on pull requests related to contributed texts during the lifetime of the grant
      • Privileged Technology Support
  • SCTA International Association Member
    • Association membership is intended for institution consumers of SCTA data (libraries, museums etc.)
    • As opposed to requiring a subscription costs to pay-walled database, SCTA makes its data open to libraries and other institutional consumers, with the expectation that libraries will recognize that open data is replacing pay-walled data, but still needs to be financially supported (See for example the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Model) https://plato.stanford.edu/support/sepia.html). For other similar kinds of membership see the “Programming Historian” Institutional Partner Program https://programminghistorian.org/en/ipp
    • Membership in the SCTA International Association is an adjusted rate depending on institutional size (usually between $50 and $250 a year)
    • One time contributions can also be accepted/invoiced and will be treated as the equivalent of a one-year membership
    • Benefits
      • Access and support in using the SCTA OAI-PMH API (and other APIs of interest).
      • SCTA-IA Membership acknowledgement on the SCTA webpage
      • IP address based banners on the SCTA site and select affiliated SCTA data consuming websites.
        • When users visit the SCTA site or select affiliated SCTA data consuming web from an IP address associated with SCTA-IA membership a banner will appear notifying patrons of the libraries support.
      • Ad hoc advice and privileged technology support from our team when faculty from a member institution need help either producing or consuming SCTA data.
        • Data creation tutorials; access to privileged education and training material
        • One on one consultations about preparing editions or constructing new data visualization (websites, print outputs, etc) from SCTA data.
        • Custom API upon requests or support
        • Custom data dumps upon request
      • Prioritization of data creation requests for SCTA relevant resources held by the member institution. For example:
        • Prioritizing transcriptions of manuscripts/codices held by a member institution
        • Prioritizing IIIF RangeLists, AnnotationsLists, etc for manuscripts/codices held by a member institution
      • An invitation to any general meeting as an advisory member (one individual per Partner).
        • Prioritization of feedback, issue, bug/feature request
      • An annual breakdown of expenditure.

Example of membership fees would be used to support operational costs

Grossly simplified, the SCTA is a non-commercial, open access, community driven “data publisher” of medieval and modern texts from that scholastic tradition. By focusing on data publication rather than print or simple web publication, we help make machine actionable texts available so that text data can be linked together (via Linked data) and made available for free and open downstream publication in print or on the web in a plurality of forms. (One such downstream visual presentation can be found here https://scta.lombardpress.org).

A typical granted-funded partner (a “supporting contributor (group)” member) writes in a budget line for the SCTA membership as part of their grant proposal. The fee would vary depending on the size of the grant and the project. For a typical project, the fee might be somewhere between $1,000-$5,000 annually over the lifetime of the grant.

If a grant is successful, membership fees would be pooled by the SCTA with membership fees from other groups, and together these fees would be put toward the long term operational costs.

These membership costs should be viewed as similar to what a traditional publisher might charge as a “subvention” or “Article Processing Charge” (APC) for open access publication. Since granting agencies like the ERC usually expect that research outputs are made available as “Open Access” and publishers require APC charges for “Open Access”, granting agencies generally understand these costs.

Long-term sustainability of DH projects is a perpetual problem form short-term funded grant projects. But with this approach the SCTA is offering a way to absorb a small percentage of grant money, and then, by pooling resources together with other grant funded projects, extending the reach of that money into the long-term future for the benefit of all projects, not just one.