Ruth has been on the board of two physics journals, one conventional and the other like what I described. She tells me that the main costs are associated with servers (which surprised me), with formatting, and with salaries.
In the case of the on-line physics journal for which readers pay nothing and authors pay $2000 per paper, server and related costs are quite significant because of the requirement to ensure that papers be available essentially in perpetuity, with some budget even for future required format changes as the technology changes. Moreover, this journal sits in an environment of physics journals that must share a portal for easy access by libraries. It's a fairly complex ecosystem. For a professional journal, it is considered highly important that all papers have the same format -- the same look and feel. The formatting is done outside, by contract with a company that does this sort of thing. Salaries include a full-time secretary who receives submissions and sends out invitations to reviewers, overseen by an editor who is a physicist and gets part of his/her salary paid (because it takes a lot of time). The operation apparently about breaks even. Of course if the issue is simply that you want to put on your personal web site some pdfs that friends have sent you, with no commitment that the web site will exist next year, the costs are close to zero. Bruce On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 11:09 AM, Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]> wrote: > Bruce, > > Would you be willing to get into the weeds a bit about what those costs are? > My imagination is failing me, here. > > Nick > > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf > Of Bruce Sherwood > Sent: Friday, January 27, 2012 12:48 PM > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Elsevier — my part in its downfall « Gowers's Weblog > > There are real costs that someone must pay. A promising approach adopted by > some physics journals is to have the authors pay, with readers having free > access. NSF considers author publication fees a reasonable part of doing > business, and physicists are including these costs in grant proposals. In > some cases there are "scholarships" for truly needy submitters. > > Bruce ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
