<rant>People who use the phrases "no-cost" or "cost-free" when talking about open infrastructure (scholarly or otherwise) are being either naïve or disingenuous.

(Unless, apparently, they are graduate students or postdocs and you think borderline poverty + no work/life balance is “cost-free”)

People working late into the night and over weekends and holidays to answer questions and keep APIs working are not "cost-free."

At the very least, implying that *any part* of open scholarly infrastructure can be "cost-free" is an erasure of the many people responsible for keeping machines running, answering questions, and managing services.

As they should by implying that throwing the "distributed" magic pixie dust at the infrastructure problem somehow makes the costs vanish.

And people who know better but who still use the rhetorical device of trying to reduce an entire infrastructure and the people running it to the comparative triviality of simply "minting identifiers" should be ashamed of themselves.

The idea that "open scholarly infrastructure" can be "cost-free" epitomizes the contempt that some (not all!) researchers have for the labor of the supporters that keep their institutions running and who make their research possible.

But I digress.

Or that throwing the "distributed" magic pixie dust at the infrastructure problem solves anything at all.

And even in this charitable interpretation, the subtext is "the cost is not outsourced to parties we disapprove of."

Frankly, the most charitable interpretation of "cost-free" open infrastructure I can think of is that they mean the cost is not outsourced.

But in *any* scenario, using the phrases "no-cost" and "cost-free" is damaging the cause of getting funders to take open scholarly infrastructure seriously.

Or perhaps they conflate "no direct charge to the end-user" with "no-cost?" If so, they might want to speak with their accounting department.

Disclosure: I work for @CrossrefOrg. I am also a co-author of The Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure. And I am cranky. Bad takes are my own.

And if I were a potential user of said service, I'd be wondering what happens after those four years of funding run out.
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And frankly, if I were a funder, I'd be a little bemused at seeing the phrase "cost-free" in a presentation talking about a service I'd just funded for four years.