Keep TM alive!

<!DOCTYPE html> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <link rel="icon" href="/img/favicon.ico"/> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" /> <meta name="generator" content="Adobe GoLive" /> <meta name="viewport" content="initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1"> <title>Keep TM alive!</title>  <link href="css/layout_new.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" /> <link href="/css/layout_head_foot.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" /> <link href="/css/biscuit_notification.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" />  <script src="js/jquery-3.1.1.min.js"></script> <script src="https://code.jquery.com/ui/1.12.1/jquery-ui.min.js" integrity="sha256-VazP97ZCwtekAsvgPBSUwPFKdrwD3unUfSGVYrahUqU=" crossorigin="anonymous"></script> <script src="js/resp_header.js"></script> <script src="js/deliciousmunchies_warning.js"></script> <script src="https://www.google.com/cse/brand?form=cse-search-box&lang=en"></script> </head>  <script> var _paq = window._paq = window._paq || []; /* tracker methods like "setCustomDimension" should be called before "trackPageView" */ _paq.push(['trackPageView']); _paq.push(['enableLinkTracking']); (function() { var u="//trismegistos.org/"; _paq.push(['setTrackerUrl', u+'matomo.php']); _paq.push(['setSiteId', '7']); var d=document, g=d.createElement('script'), s=d.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; g.async=true; g.src=u+'matomo.js'; s.parentNode.insertBefore(g,s); })(); </script>  <body>  <header> <div class="wrapper wrapper-keepTMalive header-flex"> <nav class="menu"> <ul class="active"> <li id="logo"><a href="..">TM Home</a></li>  <li><a href="/keeptrismegistosalive_whatchanges.php">What changes?</a></li> <li><a href="/donate.php">Donate</a></li> <li><a href="/adopt_a_record.php">Adopt-a-record</a></li> <li><a id="registration-button" href="/registration.php"><img src="img/small_splatter.png"><span class="center-link">Register</span></a></li> </ul> <a class="toggle-nav" href="#">☰</a> </nav> <div id="header-right-section"> <div id="panic-button"> <a href="forum/index.php"> <i class="fa fa-ambulance info-tooltip" aria-hidden="true"> </i> </a> </div> <div class="search-form search-form-disambig"> <form action="/index.php?searchterm="> <input type="text" name="searchterm" placeholder="Search ..."> <button>Go</button> </form> </div> <div id="session-login"> <p>Unregistered user (8.222.208.146). <a href=# id=show_login_btn style="color: #FCE903"><b>Log in</b></a><br><a href= "https://www.trismegistos.org/registration.php" style="color: #FCE903">I want to subscribe!</a></p> </div> </div>  </div>  </header>  <div id="top" class="bg-light"> <script type="text/javascript" src="../js/halike-warning.js"></script> <div id="warning-halike"> <a href="https://www.trismegistos.org/keeptrismegistosalive.php"><img src="/img/banner1.png"></a><p><i class="fa fa-exclamation-triangle" aria-hidden="true" style="color: #034D90"></i></p><p><font color=blue>Have you remembered to use your institution's proxy or VPN?</font></p><p>Please log in or subscribe below:</p><p><b onClick=toggle_individual_form(this) id=individual_login_button>I have a login</b></p><form id=halike_individual_form action=/registrations_individual.php?cmd=login><input name=cmd value='login' type=hidden><input name=id value='' type=hidden><input name=redirect value='/keeptrismegistosalive' type=hidden><input id='halike-login-email' name=email value='' placeholder='email'><input id='halike-login-password' name=password type=password value='' placeholder='password'><input type=submit></form><p><a href="https://www.trismegistos.org/registration.php"><b>I want to subscribe</b></a><p class="no-margin">Please note that since 1 January 2020, full functionality of this page is reserved for registered users only.</p><div><div id="close-halike-warning">X</div></div> </div> <div class="first-container"> <h1>Keep TM alive!</h1> <div class="long-text"> <p>Thank you for your interest in Trismegistos' future. On this site, you will find information about the various ways you can help to keep TM alive. In the first place we would like to encourage institutions to subscribe, but you can also register personally, make a donation, or become part of our adopt-a-record program.</p> <p>Below you can read a message from TM's founder, Mark Depauw, about the various options we have tried / considered trying in order to secure funding for Trismegistos, and why we have finally opted for a subscription program.<br><a href="#TATO-message">Yes, I want to hear what he has to say!</a></p> <div class="flex extra-margin-top"> <div id="subscribe"> <a href="/registration.php">Subscribe</a> </div> <div id="donate"> <a href="/donate.php">Donate</a> </div> <div id="adopt"> <a href="/adopt_a_record.php">Adopt-a-record</a> </div> <div id="whatChanges"> <a href="/keeptrismegistosalive_whatchanges.php">What changes?</a> </div> </div>  </div> </div>  </div>  <div id="TATO-message" class="bg-dark no-border"> <div class="first-container"> <div class="long-text"> <p class="semibold no-margin">'This invaluable site also has no long-term funding or sustainability plan.'</p> <p class="quote">– Bagnall / Heath, 'Roman Studies and Digital Resources', in: Journal of Roman Studies 108 (2018), p. 177.</p> <p>Just like every plant needs water and sunshine to survive, a digital projects needs money and people to thrive. Despite our - at times quite intense - funding rain dances, however, we have not exactly been showered with money the last five years. Even our wells have started to run dry, so that today we have no other choice than to take drastic measures to assure that our collaborators will still tend to Trismegistos in the future.</p> <p>To raise money to keep a project alive there are in my mind 6 options (for those pressed for time, we've chosen option 6):</p> <p class="no-margin">1. Get funded by your university</p> <p class="no-margin-top">This would perhaps be the ideal situation: that a university cares about a project so much that it will continue to fund it, in good times and bad. Perhaps this is an option at some universities in some countries, but not in Belgium. All funding for projects is competitive and linked to short-term projects.</p> <p class="no-margin">2. Get project applications approved</p> <p class="no-margin-top">This is the path we have followed so far, with some success up until about five years ago. In Europe, projects almost always focus on innovative research questions, not on infrastructure. Funding agencies in general care little or nothing about continuity. Databases such as TM Texts, TM People, or TM Places have been created as part of a research project, but there is no funding for their afterlife, although they are by now heavily used by the community, and maintaining and updating them raises the work load. And spending a lot of time writing applications for temporary projects cannot be a very sustainable way to deal with the problem of funding.</p> <p class="no-margin">3. Raise money for an endowment</p> <p class="no-margin-top">If we cannot ask for money from our institutions and funding agencies, can we ask wealthy people to endow a position? Perhaps in the States or even in the UK, finding a philantropist willing to sponsor your endeavours might be a possibility. In Europe, however, citizens are already taxed so much, so that they are less likely to give in to these inclinations. I will gladly be proven wrong on this one, of course, so please contact me (by clicking on the envelope in the footer below) if you think this is nonsense.</p> <p class="no-margin">4. Advertising</p> <p class="no-margin-top">The main effect of advertising is that it will make TM look cheap. On top of that it would not really raise much money.</p> <p class="no-margin">5. Go to a commercial publisher</p> <p class="no-margin-top">Commercial publishers seem an attractive option to keep digital projects alive. In the past few years Brepols for example has expanded its digital assets with <a href="http://www.brepols.net/Pages/BrowseBySeries.aspx?TreeSeries=APH-O" target="blank">L'Année philologique</a>, to complement the <a href="https://about.brepolis.net/library-of-latin-texts" target="blank">Library of Latin Texts</a>. Brill is another main player, with the <a href="https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/supplementum-epigraphicum-graecum" target="blank">Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum</a> and <a href="https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/brill-s-new-jacoby" target="blank">Brill's New Jacoby</a>. Other websites have set up their own subscription services, e.g. the <a href="http://oeb.griffith.ox.ac.uk" target="blank">Online Egyptological Bibliography</a> in Oxford, or the <a href="http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu">Thesaurus Linguae Graecae</a>. But none of these projects is Open Access, and that is something we have always been committed to.</p> <p class="no-margin">6. Charge for functionality</p> <p class="no-margin">That is why we have decided to take yet another path, and ask you to subscribe not for TM's data, but for its functionality. After all, making the information accessible to you is what we spend most of our time on, and especially this last year we have - we hope - greatly enhanced the user-friendliness of TM through visualisations and improved search interfaces. Therefore, since <span class="semibold">1 January 2020</span>, the use of most of these improvements has been restricted to subscribers only.</p> <p class="no-margin-top"><a href="keeptrismegistosalive_whatchanges.php">This page</a> explains what has changed.</p> <p>Are we happy introducing this? No, but we think it is a necessity if we want to keep Trismegistos alive. Right now we are down to a single 10% job (Herbert Verreth) to keep TM upright. Willy Clarysse also spends most of his non-grandchildren-babysitting time on the LDAB, and Yanne Broux tries to keep up with TM People and the design of (new parts of) the website in her spare time, but they are volunteers. We have some technical support because we are a pilot project of CLARIAH Flanders (Tom Gheldof and Frederic Pietowksi). And I myself have the liberty of working on TM whenever I am not teaching or doing administration. The latter two take up increasing amounts of time, however, and my decreased traditional research output may be one of the reasons for the less successful project applications mentioned above.</p> <p>All in all, however, I think what we propose is ultimately fair. We hope that all of you will contact your libraries and institutions and ask them to subscribe to TM. If the costs are shared between Papyrology, Egyptology, Classics, Ancient History, Epigraphy, or whatever discipline uses Trismegistos, they are, we hope, quite modest in comparison with what others charge. And with us you can be sure that the money will only be used to assure the proper functioning and upkeep of the database and website.</p> <p>Ultimately, it is your decision. If you think TM is not worth paying for, then we will cease to exist, our collaborators will become redundant, Willy will only play cards and take care of his grandchildren, and I will return to Demotic. But we hope it won't come to that and that you will chose to keep Trismegistos alive. <a href="/registration">You can register on this page</a>.</p> <p>– Mark Depauw, for Trismegistos, 22 July 2019</p> </div> <div class="goto-top"><img src="/img/arrowtop.png" /><a href="#top">Back to top</a></div> </div>  </div>    <footer> <div class="wrapper"> <div class="flex"> <section class="footer-col"> <a href="../about">About Trismegistos</a> </section> <section class="footer-col"> <a href="../about_how_to_cite.php">How to cite</a><br> </section> <section class="footer-col"> <a href="../terms-of-use.html">Terms & conditions</a> </section> <section class="footer-col"> Contact: <script language="JavaScript"> var username = "mark.depauw"; var hostname = "kuleuven.be"; var linktext = "<i class='fa fa-envelope' aria-hidden='true'></i>"; document.write("<a class='social' href='" + "mail" + "to:" + username + "@" + hostname + "'>" + linktext + "</a>"); </script> <a class="social" href="http://www.facebook.com/TrismegistosTM" target="_blank"><i class="fa fa-facebook-square fa-lg aria-hidden="true""></i></a> <a class="social" href="http://www.twitter.com/TrismegistosTM" target="_blank"><i class="fa fa-twitter-square fa-lg aria-hidden="true""></i></a> </section> <section class="footer-col"> Last update: <div id='updateplaceholder'></div> </section> <script> var xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest(); xmlhttp.open("GET", '/lastupdate.txt', false); xmlhttp.send(); if (xmlhttp.status==200) { result = xmlhttp.responseText; document.getElementById('updateplaceholder').innerHTML = result; } </script> <section class="footer-col"> <img id="kul-logo" src="/img/KUL_logo.png"/> </section> <section id="cc-license" class="footer-col"> <a rel="license" target="blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-sa/4.0/88x31.png" /></a> </section> </div> </div>  </footer>  <div id='cookie_warning_box'> <p class="cookie-text">This site uses cookies to provide you with the best user experience. 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Keep TM alive!