On Sep 1998 Arthur P. Smith <apsmith_at_aps.org> wrote:
aps> I only know the circulation trends from 1960 on (dropping 3%/year on
aps> average) - I believe circulation actually grew from 1950 to 1960...
aps> it's hard to
aps> go beyond this kind of rough comparison to actual numbers without
aps> getting into a lot of silly technicalities (which may however be
aps> important for other arguments).
My notes from editors' reports published in the Bulletin of the
American Physical Society indicate the following circulation
figures for nonmember sales of Physical Review:
1966 4443
1967 4427
1968 4325
1969 4157
1970 3667
1989 1945
At one point, 1968, universities held up payment of page charges
for no apparent reason and put APS (and probably some others) in
the red. See the editorial by Bill Koch in the Dec. Physics Today.
While rechecking your figures you might also want to take a close
look at who is disbursing the page charge payments you'd like to
hang your new hat on. What will they do once they have squeezed
every nickle out of the libraries?
Albert Henderson, Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY
<70244.1532_at_compuserve.com>
Received on Tue Aug 25 1998 - 19:17:43 BST