What is the cost of publishing a journal?

Research Cooperative
02/05/10 11:03:22PM
@chief-admin
This is the question I typed into Google search today. Follow the link just given, and you can see new results for the same search sentence.

First up in the list of results was this article by Bot et al. 1998: " The cost of publishing an electronic journal " The article focuses on a single case-study, but raises important issues.

What next?

King, Donald W. (2007) The cost of journal publishing: a literature review and commentary
Learned Publishing 20:85-106 .

King's article is a whole lot better... a much more educated view based on many examples.

Roger Clarke at the Australian National University (and now an independent consultant) has been writing about information systems and academic publishing for many years. See: http://www.rogerclarke.com .

His article on " TheCost-Profiles of Alternative Approaches to Journal-Publishing " is really good, relating the costs to real-life situations and the different styles of academic publishing for different audiences.

I won't say more on this. I want to take a quick look at the journal Learned Publishing :

This quarterly is published by the Association of Learnedand Professional Society Publishers , in collaboration with the Society for Scholarly Publishing .

The journal is a mother lode of ideas and information about academic publishing. Most of the content (since Vol. 10 in 1997) is online and free.

Does publishing have to be difficult? Is two-sided single sheet of paper enough to get a journal started? How can we start small with minimal human support and a zero-budget? I might look into this by searching for the "zero budget" journal .

What can you find?