Academic Electronic Journals: Past, Present, and Future - Advances in Computers - page 150

required to support electronic publishing is 20% per capita higher than the skills
required to support print journals.
Producing copies is cheaper for e-journals. In p-journals, a press run incurs a fixed
cost plus a variable cost per copy printed. In e-journals, copies are created on demand
and at no incremental cost for the publisher. 22 For e-journals, the majority of the cost
of distribution is shifted from the publisher to the consumer [15,4] . Internet-based e-
journals do not require packaging, labeling, mailing, and storage of back issues. They
do incur computer storage costs, server costs, and verification of passwords. The
consumer requires broadband Internet access, disk storage and printing capabilities.
The cost to the consumer is discussed in Section 5.1.2 .

5.1.1 The Cost/Benefit of E-Journals

A hybrid journal is more costly than pure e-journals because it requires main-
taining both paper and electronic infrastructures. Advanced electronicity e-journals
are more costly than paper replacement e-journals if they use extensive multimedia
capabilities. The extra cost is in human time, the skill required to implement the mul-
timedia capabilities, the space allocated to this material, and the “horsepower” of the
server used. For example, a one-minute video clip requires 60-100 Mb depending on
the compression used while a page of text can be stored in 2 Kb.
Odlyzko [38] calculated the cost (in 1994) to the publisher to produce an article in
a p-journal in Mathematics to range from $900 to $8,700 with a median of $4,000. 23
This figure is supported by Tenopir and King's [52] study which estimated the cost
(to the publisher) of preparing the first copy to be $4,000. The cost to produce the
same article in an e-journal is estimated to be much cheaper: $300 to $1,000. 24
Clarke [7] describes four different business models for electronic journals and
analyzes the cost to produce an e-journal in each case. 25

1. The “Unincorporated Mutual Gratis e-journal.” This journal is a pure e-journal
that is published by an association or other not-for-profit organization as a
service to its community and is funded by donations or sponsorship. The as-
sumption is that senior academics, the editor, and the editorial committee do
most of the work (including marketing, solicitation of manuscript, posting ar-

22 In systemic terms, costs include such factors of production as communication, keeping records of
subscribers, and more. However, many of these systemic costs occur for both p-journals and e-journals.
23 This median is equal to median revenue calculated by Odlyzko [40] .
24 Odlyzko's work mostly refers to journals in mathematics where the cost to typeset complex formulas
is high. A page containing such formulas can cost substantially more than a page containing text only.
25 Clarke's analysis is based on the assumption that a traditional journal publishes four issues a year.
Each issue contains 4-5 articles. Each article is 15-20 pages in length.