in Understanding the Business of Library Acquisitions, (ALA, 1999)

Gary J. Brown

Strategic Info-Solutions

www.geocities.com/garyjbrown

[email protected]

Scholarly journal publishing is undergoing a profound transformation attributable in no small part to the budgetary stringency suffered by libraries, but more so to the technological advances of networked access, the standardization of electronic and printed text around HTML and SGML, the widespread acceptance of the World Wide Web for access to pre-print and e-print servers in multiple disciplines, accompanied by the decision of commercial, association, and university presses to place full electronic text of their print journals on the Web—all these measures, bold manifestations of innovative steps in search of new strategies for communicating, sharing, and selling scholarly information. (1)

Electronic journals have mushroomed into existence on the Web changing the way publishers traditionally disseminate journals, readers access them, and libraries purchase them. In 1994 the ARL survey listed 74 peer-reviewed electronic journals; one year later there were 142. (2) By 1997 approximately 1,500 peer-reviewed electronic journals in all disciplines appeared on the World Wide Web, reflecting the cumulative influence of numerous e-journal projects in the United States as well as the HEFC project in England, accompanied as well by the commitment of commercial publishers such as Academic Press, Blackwell Science, Elsevier, Kluwer, Springer-Verlag and Thomson International. At the same time Serial vendors and Consortia were announcing third-party aggregation services to access and archive the burgeoning number of e-journals. (3)

This Chapter focuses on the changing nature and economics of scholarly and scientific journal publishing as it is transformed by the challenges of access to electronic text. (4) The role of the journal in communicating scholarly and scientific information, particularly in such disciplines as physics, mathematics, and the pure sciences, has been dramatically re-centered around the researchers’ primary need for direct and immediate scholarly communication. Stevan Harnad has stated the case boldly and succinctly: "I don’t think any scholar or scientist would willingly collaborate in restricting access to his work. There is no longer any need to make that Faustian Bargain in the PostGutenberg galaxy where learned inquiry can at last be skywritten, free for one and all."(5) Indeed, the journal article in the discipline of physics, now preceded by ready an immediate access to the electronic pre-print article, is the preferred medium of communication, continuing to maintain its position over the monograph as studies as far back as the 70’s have corroborated. (6) Given an academic structure that rewards and grants tenure to faculty largely on the basis of published contributions to scholarship, and given the need for an established scholarly reputation to attract grants and research monies to an institution, the mandate to publish one’s research is widely understood. The need for rapid dissemination of one’s research now made possible by the advances of technology has influenced the creation of e-print servers. But where does this leave the print journal publisher? (7)

Obviously this presents new challenges to publishers who initially have not been an integral part of this pre- and post-print access scenario. (8) Perhaps the saving grace of publishers is their traditional role of adding value to the process of scholarly communi-

cation—their traditional role of gathering, selecting (through an organized process of peer review) and enhancing the expression of ideas in publications of prestige and value; a fact recognized or underplayed in one way or another by Harnad and Odlyzko in their early announcements of the end of the print journal. It is interesting to note that we do not see the same e-print activity in the areas of medicine or chemistry as we see occurring in the disciplines of mathematics and physics. Could part of an explanation be the habits of researchers in those disciplines? Harnad points out that there is a safety net under the Ginsparg server, "held in place by the ‘Invisible Hand’ of peer review, which is still being financed by the publishers whose paper journals are still the final resting place for virtually every e-print in xxx [the Los Alamos server]." (9)

Traditionally the publishing process has organized itself around the sequence of planning, producing, and disseminating. These activities are assigned to "Editorial," "Production," and "Marketing" whether represented by entire divisions within large publishing houses or by one person in a very small operation. Publishers of both monographs and journals generally fall into the categories of university presses, commercial publishers, and learned societies or professional associations. (10)

In book publishing an editor (acquisitions, developmental, or copy editor) deals with the process of acquiring, preparing, and editing the manuscript for publication. (11) Levels of editorial involvement and responsibility vary depending upon the nature and perceived market for the book whether mass-market paperback, trade, scholarly, professional reference, medical, or textbook. In contrast, editorial responsibilities in journal publishing differ markedly, since the editors and the editorial board of a journal often are not members of the publishers’ staff, but instead are affiliated with an academic, corporate or governmental institution where they conduct research and/or teach, and publish within their discipline. The relationship between author and editor then, is often a relationship between colleagues. Large publishers, however, maintain an editorial staff to manage the editorial and production procedures.

Thus the process of acquiring manuscripts for publication and the ‘decision to publish’ rests not with the publisher, but with academic or professional peers who anonymously referee submitted or requested material. (Of course, this varies when the item being considered for inclusion in the journal is a report, letter, or note of information.) As a result, many journal publishers traditionally do not incur the major costs of a salaried editorial staff to the extent that book publishers do, nor do journal publishers provide royalty payment to authors as is the practice with commercial publishers of monographs.

In the case of many learned societies in the United States, page charges which are paid by the authors are assessed in order to help defray journal publication costs.

The traditional production process for a book or a journal essentially follows the same procedures: 1) Design decisions need to be made about what type font and size to use, whether illustrations or half-tone reproductions will be employed. 2) Type specification involving page size, paper quality and weight need to be established. 3) Composition vendors are selected (if not handled in-house or if the author does not supply an electronically formatted version of the manuscript). 4) Printing and binding require scheduling or vendor assignment if not part of a publishers operation.

The journal like the monograph has fixed and variable production costs. Fixed costs such as composition, author corrections, plates, illustrations, press make-ready costs such as paper, printing, binding operations and postage fees increase with the number of pages and copies printed.

The important difference with the journal however, involves its serial nature. Because of its frequency pattern and the successive repetition of these production procedures, both fixed and variable manufacturing costs are higher. Special issues and larger page counts made to accommodate the increasing number of accepted articles contribute to the rise of costs and subscription prices.

The marketing efforts made to publicize, promote, and distribute a book vary widely according to the nature of the book in question (e.g. mass-market paperback versus a university press scholarly title). The author tours, television appearances, and radio talk show interviews used to promote a popular title obviously do not fit for a specialized monograph such as, Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier (MIT Press, 1996) and much less for a scholarly or scientific journal such as Brain Research (Elsevier). The scholarly journal has to develop a much more conservative marketing plan which targets research libraries, academics, and specialists relying principally upon traditional means of advertising: brochures, catalogs, direct-mail, and recommendations among colleagues. In addition a prestigious editorial board, with a widely recognized body of researchers and academics are valuable ‘advertising assets’ that will help a new journal on its way to success and insure the continued subscription by libraries and individuals.

The e-journal has radically changed certain aspects of the journal publishing process while at the same time relying heavily on standard, traditional editorial, production, and marketing procedures. Publishers have experimented with different ways to integrate new procedures necessary for the conversion to electronic text. Peter Boyce has articulated the new skills learned in editing an electronic version of the Astrophysical Journal Letters in cooperation with the University of Chicago Press. He lists six steps and issues in the electronic publishing process rooted in traditional procedures but centered on the essential and critical process of database preparation which involves the design and tagging of electronic text of SGML and PDF formats, the construction of access, and the provision for open links, and interoperability among platforms, systems, and software: (12)

1. Author preparation—the first step in the publishing process
2. Peer review
3. Copy editing and typography
4. Database preparation—core electronic system to insure access and interoperability
5. Production and Distribution
6. Archiving

The experience of the development team in producing the Electronic Astrophysical Journal Letters (EApJL) exemplifies the re-engineering of a print journal. A sampling of topics from their project notes and diary updates provides an inside view of the challenges presented: the question of how to render mathematical symbols on the screen, the use and integration of different text processor software (Word, TeX, Scientific Word, LaTeX), what authoring software tools to use; the conversions to SGML for preparation in HTML and PDF formats—with consideration of new Extensible Markup Language software (XML) for converting SGML documents to the Web, internal linking, thumbnail presentation of article text, selection of search engine software and compliance with Z39.50, citation service planning and linking procedures, the issues of "forward referencing", access and links to outside resources, construction of the "Urania Resource" with easy links among the entire body of astrophysical journal articles, references, citations, data and catalogs, the decision to mount the complete archive of all back issues of ApJL. (13)

Like any organization, in order to continue operations journal publishers need to insure that income exceeds expenses; commercial publishers cannot survive without profit, and where profit is lacking for society publishers and university presses some form of subsidies are sought.

By way of summary, the cost side of the balance sheet for a journal lists such expenses as editing (copyediting, proof reading, layout), production and manufacturing (typesetting, illustrations, printing, binding and paper, reprints), marketing (advertising, direct-mail), and distribution (postage, delivery, subscription fulfillment). On the income side of the balance sheet journal publishers rely on the following sources of revenue: subscriptions (member or institutional), pages charges, advertising, back numbers, reprints, microform sales, and permission rights. (14)

Since the journal has production and manufacturing costs that cannot be lowered readily by the economies of scale normally associated with monographic publishing, it must look at other areas on the balance sheet to recoup expenses. The principal source of revenue for a journal is its subscription base which publishers try to keep as broad as possible through different member and institutional rates. Non-profit association and learned society publishers in the United States can rely upon page charges to authors to help defray the fixed and variable costs of publishing, but university presses and commercial publishers traditionally have not used this procedure. (15) Added sources of revenue such as advertising, reprint, etc. contribute less significantly to overall profitability. Since the frequency of a journal and number of pages directly affect costs, publishers rely upon an important analytic tool referred to as the break-even analysis. It allows the calculation of the number of journal subscriptions needed to offset basic costs, and the number beyond that point to insure profitability. Cost per page can thus be determined and average price per page set (and thus the overall price of the journal) in order to insure needed revenues and projected profits. (16)

Annual cost and revenue statistics for journal publishing are not available readily because traditional publishing industry sources such as the annual Industry Statistics Report of the Association of American Publishers do not break out cost figures for periodical or journal publishing. Nevertheless extensive studies of U.S scientific and scholarly journal publishing by Machlup and King in the late 70’s can serve as an initial point of reference for understanding the economics of journal publishing. As an example, Machlup’s

survey of 137 journals (72 from learned societies, 25 from university presses, and 40 from commercial publishers) revealed that nearly 65 percent of publisher revenue was derived from subscription sales. University presses relied upon subscriptions for a full 79 percent of their revenue. The second largest source of revenue, 13.7 percent, came from

advertising. Page charges levied by 22 society publications and two university journals provided 8.3 percent of total revenue. In actuality these 22 society publishers alone derived a full 13.2 percent of their revenue from page charges. The sale of back issues, reprints, microform, permission fees, and miscellaneous sources provided cumulatively 13.5 percent of revenue. (17)

In the 80’s a study of six journals published by the American Institute of Physics (AIP), a non-profit society publisher, provided both cost and income statistics. (18) On the revenue side they coincide in many respects with Machlup’s findings for journals studied in 1974. For the six AIP journals, subscriptions account for 61 percent of revenue as opposed to 65 percent in the Machlup sample. Voluntary page charges, however, contribute almost three times more—33 percent compared to 13.2 percent in Machlup’s study. Table 1 shows expenses and income for Applied Physics Letters, Journal of Applied Physics, Journal of Chemical Physics, Journal of Mathematical Physics, Physics of Fluids, and Review of Scientific Instruments. Publication expenses for the six AIP journals amount to $5,026,000 leaving earning of $1,174,000 from the total income of $6,200,000. The overall margin of profitability for these journals is thus calculated at 23 percent.

Table 1 Summary of Expenses and Income for Six AIP Physics Journals

1982 Journal Expenses 1982 Journal Income

Amount Percent Amount Percent

Editorial 1,360,000 27% Page Charges 2,039,000 33%

Composition 1,378,000 28% Subscriptions 3,835,000 61%

Illustrations 50,000 10% Advertising 57,000 1%

Paper 525,000 1% Microfilm Sales 67,000 1%

Printing & Binding 506,000 10% Back number sales 29,000 1%

Mailing 468,000 9% Reprint Sales 141,000 2%

Subs. Fulfillment 142,000 3% Royalties 32,000 1%

Reprints 362,000 7%

Misc. 235,000 5%

Total Expenses 5,026,000 100% Total Income 6,200,000 100%

The cost of journals in the 90’s has continued to increase, and although comprehensive data is unavailable, the most recent estimation provided by the American Chemical Society, which publishes 26 journals, projects publishers costs within the following ranges:

"An average journal has a circulation between 1,000 and 10,000 subscribers, small to minuscule by popular publishing standards, resulting in proportionately higher per-page publishing costs. Editorial management, including peer-review, represents about 10 percent of a journal’s cost. Editorial mechanics adds another 30 percent. And finally, electronic production, including design, layout, and illustration represents an additional 30 percent." (19)

Andrew Odlyzko made the following estimate of explicit and implicit costs associated with the production of a typical article based on samples from mathematics and theoretical computer science journals:

1. Estimated median cost of publisher: $4,000
2. Library costs other than purchase of journals and books: $8,000
3. Editorial and refereeing costs: $4,000
4. Costs of preparing a paper: $20,000

Although these are rough approximations of the cost to produce an article, Odlyzko points out that most attention in discussion of library or scholarly publishing "crises" has been paid to his estimate of publisher revenue at $4,000 per article. "…even the least expensive print publishers still operate at a cost of around $1,000 per article. Electronic publishing offers the possibility of going far below even that figure." (20) This is a point that is obviously debated by publishers and for which there remains some skepticism. Relying upon the experience of developing EApjL, Peter Boyce maintains that the wide speculation about cutting costs in half by producing a refereed journal in an electronic form was unfounded even taking into consideration the savings gained in printing and mailing costs. "We now know that the savings realized by the elimination of in-house keyboarding are just about offset by the additional cost of copyediting a manuscript on-line. Moreover, there is strong demand that journals continue to be produced in the old paper form as well as in the new electronic form. Preparing the electronic material for both paper and electronic delivery is a significant additional cost that makes electronic production a break-even proposition at best." (21) Boyce does posit a possible 25% savings once publishers have gained sufficient experience and more effective production tools and procedures become commonplace.

The decades of the 80’s and 90’s have witnessed a continuous increase in serials prices. Study after study and graph after graph have demonstrated what is now painfully obvious to all—the curve always goes up. Shrinking budgets and the need to cancel print subscriptions has led to the optimistic expectation that the electronic journal would provide relief from such budgetary suffocation. It remains to be seen, however, if the electronic dissemination of scholarly information can effectively address the issues of rising prices and the needs of both the academy and publishing community. Scholars view the electronic journal and e-print servers from the perspective of researchers attempting to disseminate their ideas to the widest body of interested readers. Publishers on the other hand, scholarly as well as trade, are in search of the means of growing profits by exploring the alternatives of e-commerce while maintaining the market share of their paper-based products.

Some innovative pricing scenarios have evolved in the light of the accepted challenge to transform the dissemination of scholarly information. Drawing upon analogous pricing models in the telephone and cable service industry, some publishers in cooperation with consortia and universities have adopted a bundled subscription approach. Others have combined traditional pricing with "pure bundling" and "mixed bundling" options.(22)

Some examples will suffice to exemplify such pricing strategies: the International Digital Electronic Access Library (IDEAL) of Academic Press, Elsevier and the PEAK project at the University of Michigan, and Blackwell Science Publishers.

In 1996 Academic Press launched IDEAL converting all of its 175 journals to HTML and mounting them on the Web. The IDEAL approach to pricing best represents a "pure bundling" model which only permits licensed access to the entire 175 electronic journals by library consortia—excluding individual subscriptions by an institution, and the purchase of individual articles. The cost of the consortial license is calculated on the original base of all print journals subscribed to by members of the formed consortium, adding 10% for unlimited, full electronic access to all licensed AP journals. Faculty, staff, and students have access from the library or remotely for printing, downloading, creating course packs, or electronic reserves. Given this pure bundled model, advantages are provided to both buyer and seller, though not necessarily to every buyer or potential buyer. For those buyers to whom it presents a viable option, valuation depends upon use and access. For the seller, value is dependent upon elimination of market inefficiencies and extraction of return on all products in the bundle. In such a scenario "the more goods included in the bundle, the less likely it is that any given consumer’s valuation will be very low or very high. …such a reduction in ‘buyer diversity’ typically helps sellers extract higher profits while reducing the deadweight loss from non-zero prices. The benefits of bundling are greatest when the marginal cost of the goods is very low, and when the valuation for individual goods are of comparable magnitude." (23)

The PEAK project at the University of Michigan in cooperation with Elsevier, as described from the perspective of economists Jeffery MacKie-Mason and Juan Riveros "concerns a controlled field experiment to investigate the effects of product bundling and pricing structure for electronic access to scholarly literature." (24) The benefit of this ‘experiment’ presumably will help determine, by careful analysis and evaluation of user experience, the effectiveness of multiple pricing scenarios, the variations of bundled and unbundled electronic subscriptions—e.g. differently arranged subscription packages, purchase of individual articles, pay per access, etc.—and the benefit to both university and publisher. It is in this respect that they point out that "Electronic access enables both publishers and libraries to engage in new product bundling and nonlinear pricing schemes. The first will often involve unbundling of traditional journal components, and then rebundling in a greater variety of packages, some of them customized for customers, or customizable by them." (25)

Finally the development and pricing of e-journals edited by Blackwell Science provides an interesting mixture of unbundled strategies that reveal a different approach to testing the market presenting the consumer with a variety of individual choices. Blackwell Science has chosen to mount the data for their e-journals on host partners having initiated their project in cooperation with UK Higher Education Institutions under a National Pilot Site License facilitated by Bath Information & Data Services (BID). Print and electronic versions are maintained with separate and combined pricing; a subscription solely to the e-journal reflects a lower price (10%) than the corresponding print subscription. Subscription to both the print and electronic versions reflects and approximate 30% increase to the base price of the print version. Personal subscriptions, where allowed, also reflect the same options and pricing ratios. There is also discussion about permitting the purchase of individual articles.

The different pricing scenarios in operation currently are, in effect, attempts by publishers in conjunction with their "partner" buyers to evolve a viable pricing policy that permits survival, growth, and the development of newly focused, added value information services.

The efficiencies that eventually are realized by new software tools and production procedures can help contain expenditures, but the ongoing costs of continuing to develop and provide paper and electronic "editions" are considered factors that will continue to keep prices high in scholarly publishing.

The challenges of scholarly publishing reflect an evolving, radical transformation of the information chain-- the process through which we create, acquire, and use information. High costs, the twigging of knowledge and traditional disciplines, the digitization of information and its consequent alteration of the ways in which we access, acquire, store, and utilize this information-- all are contributing factors that have altered the ways in which we read and write. We now find ourselves entering a new stage in the development of infrastructures for the creation of digital libraries, and the elaboration of archival strategies for the maintenance of electronic information.

The scholarly print journal, if it survives as we know it, increasingly will fulfill a secondary role to that of immediate electronic access provided by the interchange of author-publishers who present their work in different stages of evolution on pre-print and post-print servers. The major issues of the past decades—the dissemination of scholarly information, access, resource sharing and costs—are prologue to the chapters we are finalizing through models of trial and error. How we will complete these new chapters depends in great part on how successfully we redefine our roles in creating, accessing, and disseminating scholarly information.

1. For an overview of information on electronic publishing consult the comprehensive and regularly updated bibliography maintained by Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography http://infor.lib.uh.edu/sepb/espb.html. E-print servers have appeared in many disciplines, principal among them physics, astronomy, economics, international relations, and political science. The first e-print servers appeared in high energy physics at Los Alamos and Stanford University. See P. Ginsparg’s discussion of his e-print archives in "Winners and Losers in the Global Research Village," a presentation at the conference on Electronic Publishing in Science, held at UNESCO HQ, Paris 19-23 Feb. 1996, http://xxx.lanl.gov/blurb/pg96unesco.html. For information on the SLAC/HEP (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center/High Energy Physics) databases consult http://www-spires.slac.stanford.edu:80/FIND/spires.html. See the American Astronomical Society home page for information about ‘Urania Resource’ http://www/aas.org/. The Economics Working Paper Archive can be consulted at http://econwpa.wustl.edu. Columbia University Press created Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO) a database of papers-in-progress on international relations: http://www.ciaonet.org/. The American Political Science Association in cooperation with Harvard University Library has launched "PROceeding: Political Research Online for access to conference papers, http://pro.harvard.edu/.

2. The ARL Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists can be consulted at http://arl.cni.org. For a listing of other directories see http://www.coalliance.org/other .html.
3. For a listing of electronic publishing and related projects in the United States and Europe see http://www-leland.stanford.edu/group/stepp/, and for an annotated directory of links to major electronic text projects consult http://frnak.mtsu.edu/ ~kmiddlet/libweb/electpub.html. The Higher Education Funding Councils of Great Britain (HEFC) funded a two-year project (1996-97) that provided Web access to the electronic journals of Academic Press, Blackwell Science, and The Institute of Physics for 180 universities and colleges of higher education in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Serial vendors have loaded table of contents and abstract data with access to full text of e-journals (Blackwell’s Electronic Journal Navigator, Swetsnet, Dawson’s Information Quest), while other aggregators OCLC, ISI, Ovid Technologies and EBSCO Host are storing text on their server. The question of archiving e-journals is being addressed by JSTOR, OCLC, CICnet, and the National Libraries of Canada and Australia. For a useful summary of these developments see George Machovec, "Electronic Journal Market Overview—1997" http://www.coalliance.org/ reports/ ejournal.htm and the excellent survey of activity in the first five years of this decade by Steve Hitchcock, Leslie Carr and Wendy Hall, "A Survey of STM Online Journals 1990-95: The Calm Before the Storm" in the 6^th edition of the ARL Directory (see note 2).

4. Our use of the term ‘journal’ coincides with the traditional understanding of a scholarly journal of refereed articles; a group of literature Stevan Harnad refers to as ‘esoteric’ or non-trade literature as distinguished from grade periodicals in which authors are paid for their work. See Harnad, "The PostGutenberg Galaxy: How to get there from here," The Times Higher Education Supplement May 12, 1995.

5. Stevan Harnad, "The Paper House of Cards (and why it’s taking so long to collapse)," Ariadne, Issue 8, March 1997 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue8harnad/.

6. Studies of scholarly publishing in the 70’s and early 80’s by King, Machlup, Fry, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities addressed major issues facing scholarly communication which now must be read in the light of the technological developments of the 90’s. See the following: Donald W. King, et al., Scientific Journals in the United States; Their Production, Use, and Economics (Stoudsburg, Penn.: Hutchinson Ross Publishing Co., 1981); F. Machlup, et al., Information Through the Printed Word: The Dissemination of Scholarly, Scientific, and Intellectual Knowledge Vol. 1: Book Publishing; Vol. 2: Journals; Vol. 3: Libraries; Vol. 4: Books, Journals, and Bibliographic Services (New York, N.Y.: Praeger, 1978-80); Bernard M. Fry and Herbert S. White, Publishers and Libraries: A Study of Scholarly and Research Journals (Boston: Lexington Books, 1976); Scholarly Communication: The Report of the National Enquiry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). For an analysis of British Journal Publishing see Alan Singleton, Chapters 9-11, in Peter J. Curwen, The UK Publishing Industry (Oxford: Pergamon, 1981).

7. The early predictions of the demise of the paper journal have subsided with the realization that radical change is arriving later than originally perceived and with the fact that traditional publishers are forging a role for both print and e-journals. See Andrew M. Odlyzko, "Tragic Loss or Good Riddance? The Impending Demise of Traditional Scholarly Journals," (1994) and "The Slow Evolution of Electronic Publishing," (Preliminary Version, Sept. 10, 1997) http://www.research.att.com/~amo/. See also Stevan Harnad’s articles from 1990 to 1997 http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/intpub.html. In their paper "Economics and Electronic Access to Scholarly Information," Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason and Juan F. Riveros make a compelling argument for the value publishers add to authoring: "Publishing adds significant value to authoring. The digital revolution is changing sources and amounts of value added, but not eliminating it. The costs of some functions are decreasing rapidly, but other costs are not. Meanwhile, as new information services are developed, new opportunities for publishing value-added are also created." section 2.1 Publishing Economics, delivered at Conference on Economics of Digital Information and Intellectual Property, January 21-23 http://

10. See Colin Day, "Economics of Electronic Publishing" http://www.press.umich.edu/

11. For discussions of monographic and journal editorial procedures see Elizabeth A. Geiser, ed., The Business of Book Publishing: Papers by Practitioners (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985) and Lewis I Gidez, "Editorial Questions," in Economics of Scientific Journals edited by the Ad Hoc Committee on Economics of Publication (Bethesda, Md.: Council of Biology Editors, Inc., 1982)

12. In November 1993, the National Science Foundation awarded a grant for three years beginning in September 1994 to the American Astronomical Society for the development of the Electronic ApJ Letters project. The description of the project and its step by step development can be consulted at the AAS web site http://www.

13. See the AAS home page, "EApJ project TOC file" http://www.aas.org/Epubs/webinfo

14. An example of a balance sheet for the Journal of Mathematical Physics can be consulted in Robert H. Marks "’Not for Profit’ Doesn’t Mean ‘for Loss’" Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing

15. For a discussion of the practice and history of assessing page charges see Marjorie Scal, "The Page Charge," Scholarly Publishing 3:62-69 (1971) and A.F. Spilhaus, Jr. "Page Charges," in Economics of Scientific Journals 21-27.

16. See Ben Russak "The Economics of Journal Publishing," Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (1981) 174-177, for a discussion and application of break-even analysis for a new journal.

17. Machlup, Information Vol. 2, 137, table 3.4.13. For a more complete discussion consult Vol. 4, Part 8 "Journal Publishing: Costs and Gross Margins." In King, et al., see Chapter 4, "Publishing Scientific and Technical Journals," and Chapter 8, "Economics of the Scientific and Technical Journal system."

18. Rita Lerner, "The Professional Society in a Changing World," Library Quarterly 54 (1984): 36-47.

19. The American Chemical Society in "The Economics of the First Copy,"

20. See his discussions in "Tragic Loss or Good Riddance?…[section 9.4] and "The Economics of Electronic Journals" http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/

economics.journals.txt.

21. "Electronic Publishing of Scientific Journals," Peter B. Boyce and Heather Dalterio

22. For a discussion of these pricing concepts see the following: J.Y. Bakos and Erick Brynjolfsson, "Bundling Information Goods: Pricing, Profits and Efficiency"; John Chung-I Chuang and Marvin Sirbu, "Network Delivery of Information Goods: Optimal Pricing of Articles and Subscriptions"; Jeff MacKie-Mason with Juan F. Riveros, "Economics and Electronic Access to Scholarly Information" papers delivered at the conference Internet Publishing and Beyond: Economics of Digital Information and Intellectual Property http://ksgwww.harvard.edu//iip/econ/econ.html#Conference Papers.

23. "Bundling Information Goods…"

24. "Economics and Electronic Access…"

25. Ibid.