>Very interesting. How much is the current page charge, and who pays it
>(the author, presumably)?
$45 and the author (or his/her institution or his/her grant) pays. [This is
the usual system of cost recovery for society-published biological journals.
Commercial publishers don't charge page charges because page charges can
only paid from government grants to not-for-profit publishers (so they get
it from the research libraries via high subscription rates.]
>And how does it relate to subscription revenue?
Page charges yield about four times more than institutional subscriptions.
>And what are the contingency plans for the paper incarnation if/when the
>demand for the paper version dries up and people only use the free
>electronic version.
No plans, but the Society can always pull the plug on Internet publication
if Society members (who are also a majority of the authors) want that.
>Do you have an estimate of what the author page
>charges will be for that purely electronic incarnation?
No, but they should be no higher than now, and they might be lower.
The Society has not asked the publisher to distinguish between page-making
plus other pre-printing charges and printing plus mailing charges. Thus I
don't know what our savings would be if the Society discontinued printed
issues. They might be enough to replace (or more than replace) the income
from institutional subscriptions.
Savings from not having to buy (and mail) reprints should be part of
cost-benefit calculations. About 80% of our authors (=their grants or
institutions, in most cases) buy reprints. The money spent on reprints is
more than half of what the Society gets from institutional subscriptions.
>Are there any
>unstable points out there, and if so, can anything be done to stabilise
>them and smooth the transition?
For journals published by scientific societies, the society members will see
to it that problems are resolved (and NOT by pulling the plug).
Commercially published scientific journals have a less certain future. If
library subscriptions cease, they must find a way to collect page charges in
my opinion. I find it difficult to imagine scientists who presently buy and
mail reprints putting up with a per-use charge for their articles (and if a
commercial publisher sued a scientist for copyright violation after he made
his own work available on his own home page, it would be a real turn off for
future submissions).
>I've branched this to some interested colleagues. May I have permission
>to archive it in a Web Hypermail discussion on this topic?
You have my permission (and for this, too).
Thomas J. Walker
Department of Entomology & Nematology
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 FAX: (904)392-0190
mailto:TJW@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu
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