e-journal budgets Stevan Harnad 16 Jun 1995 21:46 UTC
> Date: Fri, 16 Jun 1995 09:12:01 EDT > From: Kevin Ward <ward@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu> > > OK, I'll bite. I would so much like to hear some real numbers that I now > am asking about the operating budget of Psycoloquy. In a recent issue of > _Serials Review_ you mentioned that Psycoloquy operated on $15,000 per > year - So I am requesting a break-down of that amount. Perhaps then we > all can compare that itemization to our own working budgets - those of us > in the print world. It seems a bit slim, $15,000, but I guess if you are > doing it it must be possible. Or is there a large subsidy behind that > number? Is all this talk about 30/70 truly aimed at a universal e-journal > industry or is it just for those who are sitting pretty behind a > university-sponsored server who also receive free system administration? > > Trust me, if this can be proven through actual working examples, I - and > most likely several others - will be converted to this model. It is > really the time to pass these 'abstract calculations' and hear from those > who are producing e-journals about the 'real' costs involved. Glad you asked. No secret hidden subsidies so far! But Psycoloquy is atypical for one specific reason, so not the right journal on which to base extrapolations: It is a journal of Open Peer Commentary. Most journals are not. If an article is accepted, there is a call for multiple commentary. The only journals like this are (1) Current Anthropology (CA) (published by University of Chicago Press), (2) the paper journal I edit, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) (published by Cambridge University Press), which is explicitly modeled on CA, and (3) 3-4 further Open Peer Commentary journals (such as Psychological Inquiry and New Ideas in Psychology) that are modeled on BBS. Nor can I compare Psycoloquy's budget with BBS's because Psycoloquy's submission rate is still so much lower. One day it may be possible to compare, but not yet. The comparison now would be flattering to Psycoloquy, but meaningless because of the scale differences. I think the best comparisons will be with conventional journals with comparable subject matter, submission rates, acceptance rates, annual article quotas, and readership. (To be most informative, they should also be equal in number of years of publication, so new journals are compared with new journals, where start-up costs can be compared, and low initial volume can be equated.) So far, I think some of the new maths and computer science elecectronic journals are in the best position to provide data for comparing with their paper homologues, but there may be others. Comparing Psycoloquy to BBS at this point would really be misleading. I might add that Psycoloquy's budget is about to grow a bit, in order to set up a system to hypertextify it. That will be in the category of temporary seeding costs, however, rather than long-term costs. The breakdown of Psycoloquy's 15K subsidy from the American Psychological Association is easy: It all goes into paying Editorial Assistants and Copy Editors to (1) handle the refereeing correspondence, (2) copy edit and format accepted articles, and (3) maintain the listserv version. With the hypertextification grant, there will also be the cost of (4) html mark-up. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad Editor, PSYCOLOQUY (sci.psychology.digest) 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/~harnad/ http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/ ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad gopher://gopher.princeton.edu/11/.libraries/.pujournals