The Cost Comparison Tool has been developed by the 4C project to help you better manage and understand curation costs through collaboration and comparisons with other organisations.
Select Sign up. Fill in the form and press Register. After a few minutes you will receive an email message asking you to confirm registration.
Enter your organisation details. This will enable the tool to make cost comparisons between organisations and to suggest institutions similar to yours (peer organisations) for more targeted comparisons.
In the Information sharing section tick boxes to set your preferences (these can be changed later).
A cost data set could be a project, a collection, a department, or your whole organisation. You can have as many cost data sets as you like. In this step you are giving an overall view: data volume, timespan, number of staff employed, data assets, etc.
Click Save and add new cost unit. You will now be invited to add a cost breakdown.
Tell us how much money you spend on various services and map the overall cost to the categories provided. First, allocate the amount to curation activities. Next, map it to staff and purchases.
You can add several cost units to a cost data set. For example, the total cost of a digitisation project can include detailed costs of hardware, software, scanning, quality assurance, etc.
Once you are finished adding cost units, switch to Final. Don't worry, you can return to Draft mode anytime you want to update information.
Select Analyse and compare costs.
The tool now lets you see how your expenses compare with those of other organisations.
In the Global comparison section you will see how you compare against all other organisations. This is based on an average cost data submitted by all users (unless you apply one of the filters).
Select the Peer comparison tab for a comparison with individual organisations similar to yours. You can also request a contact with your preferred organisation to share experience and discuss ways to better manage costs.