----- Original Message ----- From: Prof. Tom Wilson <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, November 27, 1999 1:32 PM Subject: Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
> I totally agree with the last point - but I wonder if high > submission, high cost journals are the norm? I referee regularly for > five or six journals and in all cases the papers for review come > directly from the editor rather than from the publisher, so I suspect > that for many journals (and, given a probable Bradford/Zipf > distribution for submissions to journals, those with thousands of > submissions must be a very small minority) it is the editor's > institution that is bearing the cost rather than the publisher - so, > once again, academia is subsidising the publisher and perhaps this, > rather than the $300 a paper for the JHEP is the norm. The case of > scientific societies is rather different, since they often make the > journals available to their members at rates well below the > commercial and the whole activity takes the form of scientific > collaboration. > I've been an editor for a commercially-published journal, and I've held offices, including Treasurer, in a scientific society that has a journal. In both cases, the cost of the editor's office and his stipend were paid by the publisher. That is the norm, as far as I know. For very large journals, the position of editor may be full-time, salaried.
