The expenses are roughly equipartitioned between editorial, composition and production, and printing and distribution outlays. As the future article will make clear, several factors, including continued growth, the crisis in library funding, a decline in page charge income, large but essential expenditures to convert to electronic publishing, and uncertainty about obtaining revenue from online journals, cause us not only to discount future surpluses but to worry about the long run financial stability of the journals. Meetings income derives predominantly from registration fees. However, in consideration of the precarious state of research funding, the Executive Board has decided to keep the fees at their present level at least for next year. The Society wants its members to be able to participate in the meetings.
Dues represent the bulk of the income for funding membership operations and services.
Dues pay for our share of Physics Today, for APS News, for a portion of unit expenses and newsletters, for governance operations and for the maintenance and improvement of the membership database. Again, probably as a consequence of the pressures on the physics community, after about 100 years of essentially monotonic growth, the last few years have seen small declines in the numbers of members - just at a time when we need more resources to help preserve and improve the health of physics. We are therefore reluctant to raise the dues. It is not difficult to see why public affairs and programs are fated to operate at a substantial deficit. Table 1 is a short, representative sample list of these programs and their 1995 costs.