. He further argues that if scholars were presented with the true cost of providing these editorial services, they might in fact choose to get by without.A few years ago, drastic decreases in the costs of journals would have meant going from Cadillacs to bicycles, with journals consisting of stapled collections of mimeographed copies. However, with the advances in technology described in previous sections, we can now easily move to something that is at least at the level of a Chevy in luxury, and in addition has the cross-country capabilities of a helicopter.... Many of the features of the existing system would be gone, as a typical paper might be processed by just a single editing generalist who would combine many of the roles of today's editors, copy editors, and proofreaders. The uniformity of appearance of papers in a journal might be gone. Would that be a great loss, though? Should not the unit of scholarly publication be the individual paper, and not the journal issue? For bulky paper publications, it was natural to bundle them into larger packages. Most of the time, though, a scholar reads or even skims only a couple of articles per issue. Since most of the literature searching involves moving between different journals with different formats, why bother to keep uniform style in each journal? A uniform style of journal references also contributes to the quality of present publications. However, just how valuable is it, and how valuable will it be in the future, when each reference might have a hypertext link to the paper being referenced, or at least something like the URL address?The only significant costs associated with publishing material electronically are those associated with the efforts of the editorial board and the peer reviewers of the journal, and with the costs for storage and transmission of electronic texts. However many editors are not paid and it is extremely unusual to remunerate editorial board members or peer ...
