Professor Derek Holt, Editor of the JCM: Costs of the JCM

There has been some uncertainty about the exact nature of the direct costs
of the JCM that have been obtained from official LMS Annual Reports filed with
the Charity Commission in 2005 — 2015:

£ 467 in 2005
£ 741 in 2006
£ 367 in 2007 (11 months)
£ 341 in 2008
—— in 2009 (no figure given)
£ 4,294 in 2010
£ 4,894 in 2011
£ 5,930 in 2012
£ 6,180 in 2013
£ 7,224 in 2014
£ 15,275 in 2015

I have finally been able to account for these figures myself, or at least those
from 2010 onwards.

The exact figures are confidential, but from 2010 the LMS has been paying CUP
a fixed annual fee for hosting the journal, together with an extra cost for
each published paper, which does not depend on the length of the paper. These
charges rise with inflation each year. In addition, the LMS pays another
organisation a price per published page for typesetting and copy-editing.
There are currently no additional charges for supplementary material
accompanying published papers. I have done some calculations, and these charges
account more or less exactly for the figures quoted for 2014 and 2015.

The steady increase from 2010 onwards was mainly due to the increasing number
of published papers and pages, which was a result of the editors achieving one
of the targets set to them by the Publications Committee in 2012.

The large increase in 2015 was mainly due to the journal publishing the ANTS 14
conference proceedings. The LMS did receive some payment for this from the
conference, but they decided to keep it cheap that time, so they did not
charge enough to cover the direct costs. For the 2016 ANTS proceedings, they
will be charging significantly more, and they expect to make a profit at least
on the direct costs.