[Here is a series of exchanges on a long-standing paper journal
with page charges, gradually going electronic. Some ideas about
smooth, trauma-free transition scenarios are discussed. -- SH]
-------------------------
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 11:55:40 -0500 (EST)
From: tjw@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu (Thomas J. Walker)
Subject: 78-Year Old Journal Goes Electronic
Your interest in electronic publication of scholarly journals suggests to me
that you will be interested in what I believe is "the first long-published
[78 years], refereed, natural science journal on the Internet." For more
information, view it at :
http://www.fcla.ufl.edu/FlaEnt/fehmpg.htm
The Florida Entomological Society financed the preparation of PDF files for
the first five issues (June 1994 to June 1995). For future issues it will
probably start fully recovering its costs by increasing its per page charge
by $2.40. Authors will benefit from this additional charge by having
unlimited free reprints of their articles available everywhere on the
Internet all the time.
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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From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 95 17:35:56 +0100
Very interesting. How much is the current page charge, and who pays it
(the author, presumably)? And how does it relate to subscription revenue?
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. Do you have an estimate of what the author page
charges will be for that purely electronic incarnation?
These are all friendly questions. I applaud what you're doing,
especially your recognition that it is more sensible to recover the
costs of the electronic version from the author than from the
reader/subscriber. I am just very interested in knowing how you
envision the rest of the transition scenario going: Are there any
unstable points out there, and if so, can anything be done to stabilise
them and smooth the transition?
I think with your approach there is more hope than with the usual paper
publishers' approach of going hybrid on the subscription model (pay a
bit more for the electronic version and get both paper and electronic
subscription, pay a bit less and get electronic-only, but no free
access to nonsubscribers wither way).
I've branched this to some interested colleagues. May I have permission
to archive it in a Web Hypermail discussion on this topic?
Stevan Harnad, Editor
PSYCOLOQUY (sci.psychology.journals.psycoloquy)
Sponsored by the American Psychological Association
Department of Psychology
University of Southampton
Highfield, Southampton
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
psyc@pucc.princeton.edu
phone: +44 1703 594-583
fax: +44 1703 593-281
http://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/psyc
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/psyc.html
gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals
ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy
ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy
news:sci.psychology.journals.psycoloquy
----------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 95 12:02:23 -0600
From: Paul Ginsparg <ginsparg@qfwfq.lanl.gov>
one thing to note re this journal (which looks to point in the correct
direction, contingent of course on the answers to the questions you pose)
is that it is relatively low volume: from their issues on-line,
http://www.fcla.ufl.edu/FlaEnt/feissues.htm
June 1994 (vol. 77, no. 2, pages 201-300)
September 1994 (vol. 77, no. 3, pages 301-396)
December 1994 (vol. 77, no. 4, pages 397-532)
March 1995 (vol. 78, no. 1, pages 1-224)
June 1995 (vol. 78, no. 2, pages 225-381)
it appears they only publish roughly 700 pages per year.
i do not know how typical that is for the size of journals (so difficult
to know whether they'll be criticized as too small an operation to be
representative), but it is minuscule even compared to subfields here
such as hep-th (which at a highly restrictive 20% acceptance rate would
still publish more than that each month, and hep-th is only one of many).
still it might be an ideal model for smaller operations.
-------------------------------------------
From: amo@research.att.com <Andrew Odlyzko>
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 95 14:16 EDT
700 pages per year might be small by physics standards, but
in mathematics, say, it's not far from the median. While
there are a few giant journals in mathematics (but even
those are modest by Phys. Rev. norms), most are pretty
small ones. In fact, many of the new commercially published
math journals (rather specialized, as that seems to be
the current trend) only have around 400 pages.
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 14:36:02 -0500 (EST)
From: tjw@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu (Thomas J. Walker)
>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
Internet: TJW@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu
========================================================================
From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 95 21:24:54 +0100
> 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 eletcronic 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 substract 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 clobally and in perpetuity, for free. So there you have
it...
Stevan Harnad
