SSC's President's Page



I am, from July 1 1996 to June 30 1997, President of the Statistical Society of Canada.


My goals for this year are/were:

  1. to push the society to move ahead in electronic services,
  2. to investigate how to sell library subscriptions to its journal The Canadian Journal of Statistics,
  3. to develop services of specific value to statisticians in industry and
  4. to investigate seriously the possibility of a cafeteria style membership plan.
Of these goals the first seems to be moving ahead without my help; our Web site is developing and Liaison is now being archived on the web. The publications committee is working on increasing library subscriptions. I confess that little or nothing is happening on the industrial statistics front, at least that I am doing. The question of a cafeteria membership plan is, in fact, rather for the long term. At the moment we can't afford it; CJS does not yet have the sort of revenue which will permit us to cut off our subsidy. Here I detail some of the numbers. CJS Subscription Numbers and Costs


CJS currently has a subscription base of about 1100 copies with about 500 of these copies going to libraries. These figures result in members paying, each year, about $16K, for the Journal. (CJS is funded by a formula: $26 for each regular member and $13 for each associate member.) By contrast, the Canadian Mathematics Society derives a substantial profit from its Journals every year with not very many more members. The difference lies in the library subscription base and in the journal price. For a list of journal prices at the SFU library I encourage you to look at Journal subscription rates. You will see that the contrast between high and low priced journals is shocking and that CJS is very close to the bottom of the list. In the specific case of the Canadian Journal of Mathematics library subscriptions cost $360 and they have about twice as many library subscriptions as we; I should also note that they publish roughly three times as many pages as CJS. The result is that they make large amounts of money on the journal, a striking contrast to our own case. The executive will be asking the board to begin a plan to raise CJS library subscription prices gradually over a several year period to eliminate the need for direct subsidy from the membership.

Cafeteria Style Membership Plan Advocated


It currently costs, as I understand it, about $20 [changed from earlier wildly optimistic figure] per annum to print and mail an extra subscription to the Canadian Journal. It seems to me, therefore, that if we move to a cafeteria-style membership a member electing not to receive the Journal would expect to pay dues of about $20 per annum less than a member who does receive the journal. Sitting as an academic statistician with a reasonable annual professional development allowance this doesn't seem like much but I have talked to several people who would be much happier to join if they didn't get the journal, even if they only saved $5 per year. In any case, until we eliminate the need for the $16K transfer from the society to the journal, I do not see the cafeteria plan as practical.

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Email comments or suggestions to Richard Lockhart (lockhart@sfu.ca)