Arthur P. Smith <apsmith_at_aps.org>:
On Tue, 22 Sep 1998, Albert Henderson wrote:
> PRICE Constant
> year pages curr.$ const.$ price/page CIRCULATION PPPxcirc deflator
> 1950 4000 $25 $172 $0.043 5628 242 0.1453
> 1997 83710 $10120 $10120 0.121 2000 242 1.0000
Not quite - I was including Letters in the 1997 numbers (actually
the latest year I had data at hand for was 1995) which increases
the page count to 90456. The most recent price number I had on
hand was actually 1993, which worked out to 10.4 cents/page then.
I don't know what 1997's numbers are exactly though I could look them
up with a bit of research here.
The circulation number of "2000" is very rough, I assigned it merely
as a point of comparison. It's good to within a factor of 2, probably.
And I only know the circulation trends from 1960 on (dropping 3%/year on
average) - I believe circulation actually grew from 1950 to 1960. Note that
we charged the same price to members and nonmembers (libraries) in 1950 and
those two prices are very different now, so it's hard to go beyond this kind
of rough comparison to actual numbers without getting into a lot
of silly technicalities (which may however be important for
other arguments).
On this subject - note that the "New Journal of Physics"
(
http://www.njp.org/) has just started accepting papers on Harnad's
model - page charges to the author, free distribution on the internet.
Their price point is $500/article (only published articles have to pay).
Arthur P. Smith <apsmith_at_aps.org>
Received on Tue Aug 25 1998 - 19:17:43 BST