Harnad's vision of completely free distribution of esoteric writing is reality in the field of high energy physics. In 1990, a group of high-energy physicists around the world were sending their research papers to each other through electronic mail by using a list of electronic mail addresses. Paul Ginsparg, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratories and a very competent programmer, created what is now known as the E-Print Archive, at Los Alamos National Laboratories. Submissions are made by authors, writing in TeX or LaTeX. From the submission, software automatically creates PostScript and Acrobat PDF files (which are excellent electronic formats for technical papers as they readily display any graph or symbol). Readers access the system via the Internet by e-mail, ftp, and WWW browsers. E-mail notification lists notify subscribers each day of new submissions. Submissions are not only electronically indexed (full body indexing as the submissions are made in TeX or LaTeX), but citation references are created so that each paper not only contains a list of references in the paper, but also a list of works cited by this paper. Thus, each paper has its own built-in citation index (see Ginsparg, 1996).
This archive has been very successful. It is accessed about 70,000 times per day by over 35,000 users in 70 countries. The number of submissions to the most active area--high-energy physics-theory--is typically over 200 a month. Over 30,000 preprints are stored. Most if not all high-energy physicists no longer consult hard copy journals, only the electronic archive, and some senior physicists are rumored to no longer bother with paper publications. There are many reasons for this success, not all of them applicable to the economics profession. The E-Print Archive began with a core of fewer than 100 researchers who used the archive; they all wrote using TeX; they were technologically adept at using e-mail; the peer review process for high energy physics is such that most papers are published within six months with very few revisions; hard copy preprints were very costly to some institutions requiring budgets of $20,000 or more; there was considerable international involvement, or at least collaboration; and research results were demanded on a timely basis (days rather than years).
One might think that with no peer review or selection process, the archive would be cluttered with junk, much like the Usenet physics newsgroups or the unmoderated economics newsgroup sci.econ.4 However, in six years of operation, there is no junk (at least according to Ginsparg). The absence of junk may in part be due to the fact that with e-mail and Usenet, communications are nearly immediate, require far less effort than posting a paper, and are less formal than papers.
To get a handle on the possible cost savings from electronic publication we compare the cost of the E-Print Archive at the Los Alamos to the costs of the AER. The E-Print Archive was established with at most a couple of weeks of Paul Ginsparg's time writing the software that handles the archive's functions automatically, and originally was hosted on a machine which he also used for other purposes. The current cost for storage alone is less than six cents per paper, and less than sixty cents per paper per year including maintenance and depreciation.5
A much higher estimate of the cost can be made using the 1995 NSF grant to the archive. By unfairly attributing all of the $1,069,900 34 month grant to the archive's operating costs ( $31,468 per month), and dividing by a typical month's submissions, 1,363 in February of 1997, we have $23.09 per paper. For 1995, Hinshaw (1996) reports the budgeted expenses of the AER were approximately $967,000, and in that year, the AER published 175 articles, including long and short articles, comments and proceedings, which is an average cost of $5,622 per article. Ashenfelter (1996) reports that printing and mailing costs were $447,709 (46% of total costs, in line with Jog's estimate), or $2,603 per article Thus, by either, average total costs ($5,622 to $23.09), or average distribution costs ($2,603 to sixty cents), there is a very substantial difference in costs.
Admittedly, this comparison--which is almost too sketchy even to qualify as back-of-the-envelope--has biases. The AER includes an editorial, referee and copy-editing process; in 1995, the AER processed 919 papers or $565 per submission ($519,291 for non-distribution costs divided by 919 submissions). The E-Print Archive publishes working papers (preprints) as they are. These comparisons also do not include shelf space, time, and search costs, etc. for hard copy, or equipment or learning costs on the electronic side. Nonetheless, the difference in cost is striking, and quite supportive of the notion that a fully online journal can bring dramatic reductions in cost.