>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.
Actually, if the Society wanted to cease using journal revenues for other
activities, I believe it could give issues away at the $45-page-charge
level. But you are right, if it wanted to give issues to libraries and
charge authors $57 per page it would maintain its revenue
>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.
My basis for saying this is I read (in a book about scientific publishing
that I could probably locate it it were important) that in 1965 the U.S.
Congress passed legislation allowing government agencies and grants from
government agencies to pay page charges to non-for-profit publishers. This
was in response to rapidly expanding need to publish because of rapidly
expanding government expenditures on research. At the same time scientific
societies could no longer keep up with using dues to satisfy the publishing
needs of their members. I'm not sure why for-profit publishers were
excluded, but commercial publishers weren't publishing very many journals at
the time.
>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)?
How one charges a society's overhead has a big impact on calculations of
journal profits. Whereas the editor's honorarium is surely a journal
expense. What about the business manager's and all the expenses involved in
running a Society that has as its principal business the publication of its
journal(s).
>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.
Indeed I have. In fact, that's why I thought you'd be interested in this
example.
>> 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.
I suspect you are correct (but I could not prove it to a skeptic).
>> 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...
Absolutely!
Thanks for making me do some calculations with 1993 figures I got from the
Florida Entomological Society last year. I'm now on an Entomological
Society of America committee charged with recommending what ESA should do
with its publishing efforts. Their fiscal dependence on their journals is
at least an order of magnitude greater than for the Florida Entomological
Society.
Thomas J. Walker
Department of Entomology & Nematology
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 FAX: (904)392-0190
Internet: TJW@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu
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