> Date: Mon, 12 Jun 1995 21:59:45 -0700
> To: hyperjournal-forum@mailbase.ac.uk
> From: gotsch@leland.stanford.edu (Carl Gotsch)
> Subject: Economics of E-Journals
>
> In a recent talk, Robert Simoni, Professor of Biology at Stanford and one of
> the editors of the prestigious Journal of Biological Chemistry, provided the
> following data on the Stanford Libraries/JBC collaboration to publish the
> JBC electronically. (http://www-jbc.stanford.edu/jbc/)
>
>         (1)  JBC publishes 600 pages weekly of material in the fast-moving
> field of biological chemistry and molecular biology. The material contains
> numerous graphs, chemical symbols, and equations.
>
>         (2)  The budget of the journal in its print version is $7.8 million.
> The association that publishes the journal has calculated that it would save
> roughly $2.5 million annually (30%) by eliminating actual printing and
> distribution costs.

Carl Gotsch's posting raises again the contentious issue of whether the
true savings on e-only journals will be 30%, as most publishers reckon
it, or 70%, as I and most other actual e-only journal publishers reckon
it. There is a discussion of this in:

ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/Subversive.Proposal

The source of the discrepancy is that implementing peer review and
redaction alone does not cost 70% of paper page costs in e-only
journals; my own estimate is that it costs closer to 30% or lower.
It only costs 70% IF YOU KEEP THE PAPER WAY OF DOING THINGS IN PLACE
and merely subtract paper printing and distribution costs from current
expenses. But of course a lot of restructuring goes with going
electronic only, and in the process many paper line-items (like
subscription and fulfillment, and, to be fair, all overheads from any
parallel paleolithic paper operations) vanish.

Instead of continuing to do these abstract calculations, why not just
get the real data from the actual editorial offices of the small but
growing fleet of brave new e-only journals?

The Subversive Discussion is being published as a book edited by Ann
Okerson of the Association of Research Libraries. She also edits the
annually updated Directory of Electronic Journals. The email addresses
of all the editorial offices are contained therein.

Another suggestion: Why not archive the hyperjournal-forum discussion as
a Hypermail Archive on the Hypermail Home Page? All the list owner needs
to do is to save all the postings in a unix mail file, with headers.
The Hypermail sofware does all the rest. See my Hypermail Archive as a
sample:

http://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/index.html

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