For more than 45 years, research institutions have supported the “publication charge plan” and thereby shared part of the expense of publishing the results of the physics research they have sponsored. The cost of publishing falls naturally into two general categories: (1) editorial work and composition; (2) printing and distribution. An excellent fitting of publication income to publication costs can be made by adjusting the publication charges to cover the cost of editorial work and composition and then adjusting subscription rates to cover the cost of printing and distribution. Such an ideal situation does not exist in practice, but the basic philosophy of this kind of division is approximated at the American Institute of Physics for member subscriptions. Specific identification of cost categories and an awareness of their magnitude has also provided incentive to improve productivity and lower costs. Despite inflation, most publication charges are at nearly the same level as they were in 1970. In addition, publication schedules have been streamlined with monthly journals being put in the mail 35 working days after receipt of the last manuscript from the scientific editors. The overall result is a healthy publishing program with journals having a much larger circulation, at lower subscription rates, than journals published without a publication charge plan.

Expansion of typewriter composition and the shift from letter press to sheet-fed offset and web-offset printing are two major developments that are lowering costs and improving the efficiency of the overall publishing operation at the American Institute of Physics (AIP). In 1972, out of a total of 104 000 text pages published by AIP and its member societies, about 69 000 pages, or 66 percent, were typewriter composed. Typewriter composition of scientific articles was pioneered by S. A. Goudsmit, Editor-in-Chief of the American Physical Society, for Physical Review Letters. This weekly publication has been typewriter composed since 1958. Today, about 11 000 pages for Physical Review C and Physical Review D are typewriter composed at AIP's new publishing facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Another 8000 pages mainly for Applied Physics Letters and the Journal of Applied Physics are produced by our Publications Division Composition Section in New York City. A small fraction of the total is composed to AIP specifications by the authors themselves. Outside contractors handle the remaining typewriter composition including all of the Russian translation journals. The main justification for the switch from monotype to typewriter composition is the resulting savings of 20 to 30 percent in composition cost Depending upon the journal and the compositor used, these savings amount to as much as $10 per page. In addition, the close coupling of copy editing, composition, proofreading, and page makeup that is possible with an in-house typewriter composition operation has shortened publication time by as much as 2 weeks out of a total of 3 months. We will describe the AIP typewriter composition system from copy editing, through the composition of galleys, to page makeup and the production of final camera-ready copy for offset printing. Specially modified IBM Executive proportional-spacing electric typewriters, equipped with unique attachments, permit the use of a wide range of special characters and signs (italic, Greek, mathematical symbols, superscripts, etc.) needed to compose scientific articles.