Introduction

It is now practically universally accepted that scholarly journals will have to be available in digital formats. What is not settled is whether they can be much less expensive than print journals. Most traditional print publishers still claim, just as they have claimed for years, that switching to an electronic format can save at most 30% of the costs, namely the expenses of printing and mailing. Prices of electronic versions of established print journals are little, if any, lower than those of the basic paper versions. What publishers talk about most in connection with electronic publishing are the extra costs they bear, not their savings [BoyceD]. On the other hand, there is also rapid growth of electronic-only journals run by scholars themselves and available for free on the Internet.

Will the free electronic journals dominate? Most publishers claim that they will not survive (see, for example, [Babbitt]) and will be replaced by electronic subscription journals. Even some editors of the free journals agree with that assessment. My opinion is that it is too early to tell whether subscriptions will be required. It is likely that we will have a mix of free and subscription journals and that for an extended period neither will dominate. However, I am convinced that even the subscription journals will be much less expensive than the current print journals. The two main reasons are that modern technology makes it possible to provide the required services much more cheaply, and that in scholarly publishing, authors have no incentive to cooperate with the publishers in maintaining a high overhead system.

In section 2 I summarize the economics of the current print journal system. In section 3 I look at the electronic-only journals that have sprung up over the last few years and are available for free on the Net. I discuss the strange economic incen-

tives that exist in scholarly publishing in section 4. Finally, in section 5 I present some tentative conclusions and projections.

This article draws heavily on my two previous papers on scholarly publishing, [Odlyzko1, Odlyzko2], and the references given there. For other references on electronic journals, see also [Bailey, PeekN]. It should be stressed that only scholarly journal publishing is addressed here. Trade publishing will also be revolutionized by new technology. However, institutional and economic incentives are different there, so the outcome will be different.

Scholarly publishing is a public good, paid for largely (although often indirectly) by taxpayers, students' parents, and donors. The basic assumption I am making in this article is that its costs should be minimized to the largest extent consistent with delivering the services required by scholars and by the society they serve.