Electronic reprints

Thomas J. Walker, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL
tjw@ufl.edu
9 June 1997

This is an updated version of a paper prepared for the Publication Council of the Entomological Society of America (ESA). On the basis of the original paper and an extended discussion at their 10 Dec 1996 meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, the Publication Council unanimously proposed that ESA offer electronic reprints to authors of articles in its journals. ESA's Governing Board subsequently voted to approve the offering of e-reprints and specified that their price be commensurate with the price of paper reprints. In a teleconference on 4 June 1997, ESA's Electronic Publication Implementation Committee unanimously reaffirmed their support of ESA offering its authors concurrent e-reprints.

What are e-reprints?

Electronic reprints make traditionally published articles accessible on the Internet. They may be produced at the time the articles are originally printed and mailed (concurrent e-reprints) or later (retrospective e-reprints). In both cases they are posted as PDF files, thereby retaining the appearance and pagination of the printed article.

Concurrent e-reprints are produced from the same page-layout computer files as used to produce plates to print journal issues and traditional reprints. The page-layout files are simply printed to PDF files using Adobe Acrobat software. If the original page-layout files are still available, retrospective e-reprints are made in the same manner. If page-layout files are not available, PDF files may be made from the assembled scanned images of the printed pages. Unless special (and expensive) techniques are used, PDF files made from scanned pages are larger than those printed from page-layout files and the quality of halftones is diminished.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of e-reprints?

From the viewpoint of ESA members and authors, e-reprints have these advantages:

• E-reprints make articles available everywhere on the Internet

• E-reprints need not be stored, retrieved, and mailed to fulfill their function.

• Those who want to read an article can view it with almost no delay.

• Those who want a paper copy of an article can print one or more and as often as needed.

• E-reprints can be searched by computer and figures or text may be conveniently copied to other programs.

• E-reprints can be accessed via hyperlinks in other Internet documents.

But there are these disadvantages:

• E-reprints can be accessed only via the Internet.

• Printed e-reprints resemble high-quality photocopies rather than bound tear-sheets. They are usually printed on only one side of 8.5 x 11", unsized paper, and their quality varies with the quality of the printer used to make them.

Should ESA sell concurrent e-reprints?

Selling concurrent e-reprints may benefit ESA in these ways:

• ESA will become more competitive in attracting the best work of its members to its journals-provided that competing journals do not offer e-reprints before or at the same time ESA does.

• E-reprints may attract new members who wish to become ESA authors and participate in a better way to make what they publish available to all who are interested.

• E-reprints are an attractive and cost-effective way to introduce ESA members to Internet publication of primary scientific literature.

• E-reprints will give ESA a means of gauging members' acceptance of e-publication of primary scientific literature, thus helping it judge how fast or slow to convert to e-publication of its principal journals.

But selling concurrent e-reprints has these potential costs:

• If the percentage mark-up used to price traditional reprints is used to price e-reprints, ESA will lose income.

  The Governing Board set a price for e-reprints at its 11 Dec 1996 meeting that results in ESA making substantially more from the sale of e-reprints than from the sale of paper reprints.

• If all or most authors want to buy concurrent e-reprints, subscription income will be threatened.

  Should subscription income be threatened, its loss can be prevented or countered in a variety of ways—for example, by rationing concurrent e-reprints; by giving a discount for delayed posting or charging a premium for immediate posting; or by raising the cost of e-reprints to compensate for lost subscription income.

• E-reprints will establish a precedent for ESA making articles it publishes freely available to all who are interested.

  Members and authors will likely consider this a benefit rather than a cost. ESA members and their institutions already pay much for the more limited access the present system permits—through membership dues, page charges, reprint charges, personal and institutional subscriptions, and non-subscription costs of maintaining access to journals in research libraries. If e-publication supplants traditional publication, the total cost of publication will go down. ESA should plan to maintain its publication profits without charging researchers per-use for access to ESA articles on the Internet. In 1995, all but one member of ESA's Electronic Publication Committee agreed that "free-journal-articles on the Internet is the preferred approach for ESA to take" (Report of the Electronic Publication Committee, 17 Nov 1995).

Will concurrent e-reprints be profitable?

E-reprints sold at the same price as 100 paper reprints will yield nearly twice the profit. This conclusion is based on the following information and calculations:

• Profit from paper reprints of articles in JEE is ca. $9 per page published

Estimated 1995 income from sale of JEE reprints*	$36,790
Estimated 1995 cost of JEE reprints*	20,250
Net income	$16,540
Pages published in JEE in 1995	1,805
Net income per page	$9.16
*Harry Bradley, letter of 21 Nov 1994.

• ESA makes ca. $0.50 per published page in copyright royalties. All or most of this income will be lost for articles posted on the Internet.

In 1995, ESA published 5,383 pages in its four principal journals. Its annual copyright income from these journals totals $2524 (Harry Bradley, letter of 14 Nov 1996), making the per-page income ca. $0.47 ($2524/5383). [This is gross income rather than net because copyright registration fees amount to $912 annually for the four journals. The net per-page royalty income for 1995 was ca. $0.30 ($1612/5383).]

• Producing PDF files for concurrent e-reprints will cost no more than $1.25 per page.

Allen Press charges as little as $0.90 per page for converting journal issues to PDF, but making electronic reprints of only certain articles may increase the price. Making an e-reprint requires printing the page-layout files of the article to a PDF file using an Adobe Acrobat printer driver.

• Posting electronic reprints on the Internet will cost no more than $1 per page.

[The cost of hard-disk space is trivial. The first nine issues of Florida Entomologist on WWW, totaling 1,257 pages and 51.1 megabytes, used $7.67 of hard-disk space (@15¢ per MB). Florida Center for Library Automation, which posts Florida Entomologist for free, has proposed posting articles from ESA journals for $1 per page, to be paid by ESA discounting subscription charges to eight Florida universities. Some other library may do it for less.]

• Per-page profits for e-reprints will be ca. 192% of per-page profits for traditional reprints.

The cost of e-reprints to ESA will be no more than $2.75 per page (lost copyright royalties + fees for making and posting PDF files). The cost of traditional reprints per published page is ca. $11.22 ($20,250/1805 for JEE in 1995). [This estimate is crude because some articles are not reprinted and authors buy different numbers of reprints]. The price of traditional reprints is ca. $20.38 per page ($36,790/1805 for JEE in 1995). [Again the estimate is crude.] Thus ESA's per-page profits for e-reprints are ca. $17.63 ($20.38-2.75), compared to per-page profits of ca. $9.16 for traditional reprints ($20.38-11.22).

Should ESA sell retrospective e-reprints?

Making and posting e-reprints for articles two or more years old could become a new source of income for ESA and a new service valued by its members. Unfortunately, page layouts were not made electronically until recently. Therefore articles would need to be scanned and the bitmaps printed to PDF files. This could be done for less than $1 per page, as illustrated by the JSTOR project (Scientific American, March 1997, p. 59) and the Florida Entomological Society's project to post e-reprints of articles published prior to June 1994 (http://www.fcla.ufl.edu/FlaEnt/fehmpg.htm). Posting the files should cost no more than $2. Copyright royalties would not be significantly affected, assuming that most such royalties are paid for making copies of articles published during the previous two years. [Two years is a guess. The Copyright Clearance Center provides no data on the source of the fees it collects for ESA other than the ISSN.] Thus the cost of the e-reprints should be no more than $3 per page. If they were sold at half the price of concurrent traditional reprints (ca $10 per page), the per page profit would be ca $7 per page, some of which should be spent for making HTML files of tables of contents of already published issues of ESA journals. Such tables would facilitate access to the posted e-reprints.

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