Technology and Scholarly Communication "d0e4210"

Direct Costs of Publication

To date, CJTCS has published ten articles with a total of 244 pages. I have chosen to compare the direct costs we have incurred in publishing those 244 pages with the direct costs we incurred for a 244-page issue (Volume 8, Number 5, July 1996) of one of our print journals, Neural Computation (NC). NC has a print run of approximately 2,000 copies, and typesetting is done from LaTeX files supplied by the authors (as is the case for CJTCS) (Table 5.1). Several important differences in production processes affect these costs:

1. The number of articles published is different (10 in CJTCS, 12 in NC).

2. The copyeditor handles author queries for NC and bills us hourly. This contributed $100 to its copyediting bill.

3. Composition for CJTCS is done on a flat fee basis of $200 per article. Tagging and formatting has been done by Michael O'Donnell, the journal's managing editor at University of Chicago, because we were unable to find a traditional vendor willing to tag on the basis of content rather than format. The $200 figure was developed in conjunction with a LaTeX coding house that we planned to use initially but that was unable to meet the journal's schedule requirements. In comparison, the typesetting cost per article for NC is approximately $326, which includes a $58 per article charge for producing repro pages to send to the printer and a $21 per article charge for author alteration charges. These items are not included on the CJTCS composition bills.

For comparison, Table 5.2 shows the direct costs associated with three other electronic journals to date: Journal of Contemporary Neurology (JCN), Journal of Functional and Logic Programming (JFLP), and Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics and Econometrics (SNDE). JCN's cost per page is much higher than the other e-journals because the typesetter produces PDF and HTML formats and deals with complex images.

The issue-based electronic journal Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics and Econometrics (SNDE) is comparable in direct costs with a standard print journal, with the only difference being the lack of printing and binding costs. Table 5.3 is a comparison of the direct costs incurred for SNDE, Volume 1, Number 1, April 1996 (76 pages) and an 80-page issue (Volume 8, Number 4, Fall 1995) of one of our print journals, Computing Systems (COSY), that follows a similar production path.

Composition cost per page is comparable in these journals, but the total pro-

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TABLE 5.1. Production Costs by Article of Electronic and Print Journals
	CJTCS	NC	%Difference
Copyediting/proofreading	$1,114	$1,577	+42%
Composition	$2,070	$3,914	+89%
Printing and binding	-	$6,965	-
Total production cost	$3,184	$12,456	+291%
Composition cost per page	$8,48	$16,24	+92%
Total production cost per page	$13,05	$51,05	+291%

TABLE 5.2. Cost per Page Comparison of Electronic Journals
	#Pages	#Articles/Issues	Direct Costs	Cost/Pg
JCN	34	6 articles	$1,666	$49.00
JFLP	280	7 articles	$2,204	$7.87
SNDE	152	2 issues	$4,184	$27.53

TABLE 5.3. Cost per Issue Comparison of Electronic and Print Journals
	SNDE 1:1	COSY 8:4
Copyediting/proofreading	$551	$554
Composition	$1,383	$1,371
Printing and binding	-	$6,501
Total production cost	$1,934	$8,426
Composition cost per page	$18.20	$17.57
Total production cost per page	$25.44	$105.33

duction cost per page of SNDE is only 24% of that of COSY, which includes the printing and binding costs associated with a 6,000-copy print run.