APS Journal Pricing - 2009

Physical Review, Physical Review Letters, Physical Review Special Topics, Physical Review Online Archive and Reviews of Modern Physics

A letter from Joseph W. Serene to the Library Community

"Improved publishing operations have allowed us to reduce our subscription prices while maintaining exceptional editorial and production standards."

Introduction

The journals of the APS embody the mission of the Society “to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics.” We strive to produce journals of the highest quality, and at the same time, to keep our journals accessible to researchers and students at institutions of all types and sizes, everywhere in the world, through ongoing efforts to reduce production costs and policies such as tiered pricing and reduced-price or free subscriptions for institutions in developing countries.

Online Only in 2009

The online journals are the definitive versions of the APS publications described here. Our goal is to set the prices for the online journals to cover the costs of producing the electronic journal content and the costs of electronic distribution along with associated subscriber services (such as search engines, reference linking, RSS feeds, etc.), plus a small net return. The base price changes for online-only access in 2009 are
Tier 1 - 8% decrease
Tier 2 - 5% decrease
Tier 3 - 3% decrease
Tier 4 - 1% increase
Tier 5 - 2% increase

For all subscribers, the resulting prices will almost certainly decrease in constant dollars, even though we expect that the journals will continue to grow by approximately 5% per year. At the same time, we will continue to enhance the online services available to our subscribers, most notably in 2009 through our new online open-access journal Physics (http://physics.aps.org), which provides perspectives and overviews of the content of our subscription journals.

We have made further reductions in the price of the APS-ALL package relative to the individual journals. As a result, many online-only subscribers will actually see prices below the base figures.

We strive to guarantee the archival integrity of our online journals. In addition to the primary source at our editorial offices on Long Island, we maintain three complete and continuously updated mirror sites for all of our content. With last year’s opening of our west-coast mirror in California, these sites are now widely distributed across the country. As a further precaution, we have also deposited the full APS content with Portico.

Online-Plus-Print in 2009

In 2009, we will continue to offer the option of augmenting the basic online-only subscriptions by traditional printed copies of our journals. Our ultimate goal is to set the additional subscription prices for the printed journals to cover the expenses for printing and distribution. Because printing involves large set-up costs, independent of the number of copies printed, the incremental prices of the printed journals will eventually rise faster than the online-only prices as the number of print subscribers decreases, but for 2009 we have kept the flat (across tiers) additional fee unchanged from 2008.

Conclusion

The elected Council of the APS sets the prices of the journals after advice from its Publications Oversight Committee. Two representatives of the library community, appointed in consultation with the Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics Division (PAM) of the Special Libraries Association (SLA) attend the Committee meetings as advisers. On behalf of the Committee and the APS, I thank the past year’s advisers, Molly White of the University of Texas at Austin, and Emily Poworoznek of the University of New Hampshire. We have benefited greatly from their contributions and we value their wisdom and their friendship.

Joseph W. Serene
Treasurer/Publisher
American Physical Society