Institutional storage -- does every user have to be paid?

bryanpon
Couple thread on this, but have a new question:

If my small company (5 heavy users, a few occasional users) signs up for institutional storage, their is no real cost benefit, since volume discounting starts at 25 users. But it could have an administrative benefit for streamlining payments.

Question is, if we set up institutional storage--basically, our big group library--will access to it be limited to those users who are invited and are thus paid? i.e., could an occasional user in our organization who wants to access the library do so, even if they are on a free account?

Thanks!
  • adamsmith
    If you just want to run one big group library, you just need one paid account. I know many groups doing that. We do it in my small academic group with 7 members, but I know of some much larger groups, including in the private sector. Group storage counts only towards the owners' storage, so everyone else can be on a free account. You only would need storage for everyone in the group if they also need to store and sync files in their personal libraries. That obviously also means that occasional members of the group can have free accounts.

    Note also that your one paid account can own an unlimited number of groups if needed, e.g. for subgroups or if you want some resources to be public.

    This is actually one of the perks of Zotero: Compared to all competitors, using it for serious collaborative work is ridiculously cheap.

    My recommendation would be to set up an institutional group, not tied to any individual member and use that account to set up and own the group so that changes in personnel don't affect your Zotero group.
  • bryanpon
    Thanks Adam. It sounds like there really isn't, in this context, any difference from me personally paying for a group storage plan and setting up an institutional account to pay for a group storage plan--both cases would invite and manage members of the group in the same way.

    RE: competitor's costs, absolutely! We just looked at Mendeley and groups start at $99/month...
  • adamsmith
    If it's certain that you'll never leave the company, there is no difference. If that's even a remote possibility years down the road, having an individual account separate from the one owning the group is going to come in handy (that wouldn't be "institutional" in Zotero's sense of the word; you'd just have a separate account).
  • bryanpon
    Follow up question:

    If we go institutional group, and that pays for each of the heavy users to have 2GB storage, what happens if the institution--the company--goes away? Would the individual users then be prompted to pay for individual storage plan in order to continue accessing their libraries?
  • adamsmith
    edited June 17, 2016
    Not for accessing the libraries -- all files are always going to be local, too, not just in the cloud, so you can _always_ access them for free -- but yes, if you're going to pay for individual's storage through an institutional account and the institution isn't paying anymore, individual users would have to pay individually to continue syncing their files and storing them on the Zotero file server.
  • DWL-SDCA
    ? syncing their files, I think; data remains free or am I missing something
  • adamsmith
    thanks DWL; fixed
  • AQCPP DC
    We are a group with about 50 persons in it. If others add articles to our big group, will it affect our storage personnaly? Can we have small personnal free accounts and share references in the group which has a paid storage account by itself. Can we just buy the big storage option for our group and access all of its content via our personnal account but link together with the group?
  • bwiernik
    Storage for a group library only counts against the owner's account. Files in the group library won't count against individual members' storage quotas.
Sign In or Register to comment.