DOES L&O CONTRIBUTE RED OR BLACK INK TO ASLO?

Abstract

The production of journals is an expensive proposition. In ASLO's case, the production cost of Limnology and Oceanography is approximately 42 % of the society's total operating budget. In an effort to find out if this was typical of the way other societies deal with the production of their journals, the ASLO Board of Directors asked its Finance Committee to assess how other societies handle the issue of journal costs, compared to revenues from subscriptions, page charges, reprints and advertising. The Finance Committee, composed of Michael Arts (chair), Ruben Sommaruga, and Tom Clair put together a survey questionnaire, based on ASLO's annual budget, which they sent to seven other, similar societies. The survey was answered (in random order) by the North American Benthological Society (1,700 members), the Ecological Society of America (7,600 members), the American Society for Microbiology (42,000 members), the American Water Research Association (4,200 members), the Estuarine Research Federation (2,000 members), Society of Wetland Scientists (4,000 members) and the Phycological Society of America (2,000 members). By comparison, ASLO has 3,900 members. For this article, we simply number these societies and don't identify who is who in the following text and figures. Not surprisingly, these seven different societies have seven distinct ways of reporting revenue and expenses, but both