on Fri, 14 Dec 2001 Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_cogprints.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Dec 2001, Andrew Odlyzko wrote:
>
> > In general, I agree that to operate the way APS does, it costs around
> > $800-$1500 per article. However, that does not preclude less expensive
> > modes of operation, either with lower quality, or with shifting some
> > of the explicit financial costs that APS incurs into hidden subsidies
> > from editors and the like.
>
> And there may be even more natural ways for covering the remaining
> costs if they are partitioned in a more appropriate way for the new
> media (as a SERVICE fee for an outgoing submitted draft instead of an
> access fee for an incoming PRODUCT):
>
> "4. Whereas all refereed research should be fully accessible
> on-line without cost to all would-be users worldwide, it is
> nevertheless not altogether costless to produce. The main change is
> that dissemination and archiving cost incomparably less on-line
> than on-paper and hence the on-line dissemination/archiving costs
> per article effectively shrink to zero.
> http://www.arl.org/sparc/pubs/enews/aug01.html#6
[snip]
You can claim to save only 9 cents per article with
online distribution!
More than that was probably spent on equipment,
software, and the cost of paper and printing.
King, McDonald and Roder estimated the pre-Internet
costs of U S science journals. They put per-article
prerun costs at $1050 in 1977; runoff costs were
$0.09. [SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS IN THE UNITED STATES.
1981. p. 218-219]
Albert Henderson
Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000
<70244.1532_at_compuserve.com>
Received on Tue Dec 18 2001 - 11:37:49 GMT