> Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 14:36:02 -0500 (EST)
> From: tjw@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu (Thomas J. Walker)
>
> sh> Very interesting. How much is the current page charge, and who pays it
> sh> (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 be paid from government grants to
> not-for-profit publishers (so they get it from the research libraries
> via high subscription rates.]
> [For our journal]
> Page charges yield about four times more than institutional subscriptions.
I'm not sure whether that is a representative or complete analysis of
the story about page charges, but it is an interesting one. It means
that if you charged authors $57 per page you could give away the paper
version.
I'm not sure you're right about why other journals don't charge page
charges (or even that grants will only allow them to be paid to
nonprofit publishers), but there's lots of food for thought here.
One must also ask about the profit margins on such a nonprofit journal:
What is the true per-page COST (including only the overhead that it
would take to break even and ensure the ability to continue to do so in
the future)?
The real issue is that there is no strong rationale for authors' being
willing to pay page charges for paper journal publication, where the
distribution is so poor and inefficient and where costs can be recovered
from subscription revenue. It ONLY becomes an incentive to an author to
pay page charges (as I have long argued) when (1) the cost is within
reach and (2) it means free, global, permanent, easy access to all
(i.e., in the electronic rather than the paper medium).
That's why I ask about true costs, and in particular, true costs for an
electronic-only version.
> sh> And what are the contingency plans for the paper incarnation if/when the
> sh> demand for the paper version dries up and people only use the free
> sh> 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.
Or vice versa, I hope! What I meant was if the demand for and use of the
paper version vanishes. Surely it's the paper version whose plug should
be pulled then in YOUR system, where most of the cost is covered by page
charges anyway!
> sh> Do you have an estimate of what the author page
> sh> charges will be for that purely electronic incarnation?
>
> No, but they should be no higher than now, and they might be lower.
You already said that paper AND electronic only costs 5% more than paper
alone, so there's no reason to imagine electronic alone would be more,
but you must surely have heard the famous 70/30 controversy, where paper
publishers say electronic only save 30% per page, whereas
electronic-only journal editors and publishers argue it's more like a
saving of 70% or more per page. Using your full $57 per page figure,
that would make it under $17 per page if the 70% figure is right,
and that begins to sound eminently affordable (and close to the $10
per page one often hears quoted).
The way to arrive at 70% savings instead of 30% is of course by redoing
the enterprise bottom-up as an electronic-only one, rather than
subtracting line-items that electronic processing saves in an
otherwise intact paper/subscription system.
> 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.
They should be a lot more than that if you don't subtract but restructure
completely.
> 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.
Not to mention the authors' costs in mailing them -- and the much
greater reach that is possible from a free, globally accessible
electronic archive than any reprint-distribution effort even WITH the
help of published issues in libraries and individual subscribers'
hands...
> sh> Are there any
> sh> unstable points out there, and if so, can anything be done to stabilise
> sh> 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).
You're right about all that, I think. And authors will only pay page
charges if it makes their work available to all, efficiently and
conveniently and globally and in perpetuity, for free. So there you have
it...
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