Many publishers argue that costs cannot be reduced much, even with electronic publishing, since most of the cost is the first-copy cost of preparing the manuscripts for publication. This argument is refuted by the widely differing costs among publishers. The great disparity in costs among journals is a sign of an industry that has not had to worry about efficiency. Even in the print medium, costs can be reduced. That they have not been is due to the strange economics of scholarly publishing, which will be discussed in Section 3.
Electronic publishing offers the possibility of going far below even that figure.