Indirect Costs

The overhead costs associated with CJTCS and the comparable issue of NC vary greatly. Overhead for our print journals is allocated on the following basis:

• Production-charged to each journal based on the number of issues published

• Circulation-charged to each journal based on the number of subscribers, the number of issues published, whether the journal has staggered or nonstaggered renewals, and whether copies are sold to bookstores and news-stands

• Marketing/General and Administrative-divided evenly among all journals

For CJTCS, MIT Press incurs additional overhead costs associated with the Digital Projects Lab (DPL). These include the cost of staff, and the cost of hardware and software associated with the Press's World Wide Web server. These costs are allocated to each electronic publication on the following basis:

• Costs of hardware and software for the file server, network drops, staff time spent maintaining the server, and so on, are allocated to each e-journal based on the percentage of disk space that the journal files occupy as a function of all Web-related files on our server

• Amount of time per issue or article that DPL staff work on the journal is multiplied by the rate per hour of staff

Table 5.4 shows a comparison of overhead costs associated with CJTCS and the comparable issue of NC. CJTCS's production overhead is much higher than NC's because it is almost the same amount of work to traffic individual articles as it is an entire issue. Even though each batch of material was much smaller in terms of pages than an issue of NC would have been, it still required virtually the same tracking and oversight. Correspondingly, the general and administrative overhead from the journals division for CJTCS is dramatically higher than NC because of the small amount of content published in CJTCS. The overhead costs associated with publishing CJTCS for 11/2 years had to be allocated to only 244 pages published, whereas NC published 2,320 pages in the same period of time.

JCN takes additional time from our DPL staff because of the HTML coding and linking of illustrations, which adds an additional $7 per page to its costs. The total of direct and indirect costs per page for JCN is, therefore, in line with our print journals even though there is no printing and binding expense. SNDE incurs an additional $1,400 per issue in indirect costs for the staff, hardware, and software in the DPL.