QUOTE(Ottava @ Thu 21st July 2011, 9:11am)
I'm a tad confused as to why you think Academia = Scientific. Many pop science journals are sold, which make far more money but they shouldn't be even considered in this discussion.
With the example of Elsevier I am merely addressing your comment above:
QUOTE(Ottava)
There is very little money in academic publishing at any end. They are barely making ends meet now, and removing things like JSTOR would bankrupt them completely.
There
is money to be made at the high end, and Elsevier makes it. Thus, your comment is refuted and batted out of the ballpark. As for the low end, I don't really care if Lesbian University publishes the
Journal of Marxist Feminist Critique of English Romantic Poetry, circulation 200 (okay, desktop printrun 200), so that aspiring academic ladder climbers at Lesbian U. can eventually get tenure there, with a longer CV. Big deal. I don't think it has much to do with JSTOR, and to the extent that it does, it shouldn't. "Academic publication" of this type is pretend publication. It is not written to advance knowledge or the culture of mankind, but so that somebody can advance in a completely pretend system of merit, by means which ape the way it is done in the sciences. It is tennis played with the net down. It is
Potemkin Village. It is "cargo-cult academia" by analogy with
cargo cult science. So
what if there exists one more or less article about how Lord Byron was actually a terrible male chauvanist?
I admit, to be sure, that some of this stuff may have something to do with "academia" in the formal sense of the word (IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/yecch.gif) , but also add that that part of academia which isn't natural science might as well be state-funded religion or (at best) state-funded fine arts or sports patronage. Again, it doesn't concern me because there is no objective way to judge it, and many many ways to game it, and if it is subsidized by JSTOR's policies for the science journals, so much the worse. The necessity to provide welfare for these little humanities journals are not an argument for why JSTOR should be expensive. And yes, JSTOR IS expensive to ordinary individuals not associated with major institutions-- i.e., people not climbing an academic ladder somewhere but still doing real science and writing real patents for real business applications-- such as myself. (IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/hrmph.gif)
QUOTE(Ottava @ Thu 21st July 2011, 9:11am)
By the way, your example makes 880 millions total. "7,000 journal editors, 70,000 editorial board members and 200,000 reviewers are working for Elsevier" work for the company. Based on that many employees, less than 1 billion pre-taxed profit (remember, it hasn't been taxed yet or the rest) is incredibly tiny.
I don't know where you got the 880 million figure, except perhaps the 880 million Euro figure for operating profit of Elsevier-Reed from the
Elsevier Wikipedia article. According to that article, in 2006 Elsevier itself (the science arm) made 581 million Euros pre-tax profit or US $825 million. That is from gross revenues of $ US 2.43 billion (my cite is above), and it is before taxes but AFTER operating expenses, which includes (of course) all overhead, including employee salaries. The people you name above are all volunteers except for the paid staff, and if you're able to divide the 2.43 - 0.825 = $1.6 billion operating expenses by 7000 people on-salary, you can see that there's the potential for some very good salaries there (it comes out $229,000). Of course, not all overhead is paid in salaries, as Elsevier maintains offices and does have paper publication costs. But their editors do start at
about $60,000 and go up from there.
Incidently, assuming a international corporate tax averaging 25%, Elsevier's pre-tax profit of $825 million becomes (assuming they have litttle debt) $618 million net income or bottom line. That's what the stockholders take home as dividends. $600 million in annual take-home is real money.
As for your comment about how the pre-tax profit is incredibly tiny for Elsevier, as usual you have no idea what the you're talking about. Elsevier's profit margin is 825 million/2430 million = 34%, which is damned good for any business, and excellent for a publishing company. The top four general book publishers (e.g., Random house) only make profit margins of 8% or so, and 10% in the days before the economy got bad. So compare with your poor academic publisher, here.
QUOTE(Ottava @ Thu 21st July 2011, 9:11am)
I find it odd how you refuse to look at the majority of academic publishers, which are universities.
Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, etc, are major ones. But there are thousands of university publishers, many with journals. The ones that do make a profit publish things other than academic journals (things like dictionaries that can sell a lot of).
Then there is this: "However, the journals that have a high
impact factor " Most journals don't have a "high impact factor".
A journal like
http://www.rc.umd.edu/ksaa/ksj/index.html the Keats and Shelley Journal would be an example of a top level journal representing my field. Although it is top of its specialty, it is incredibly tiny and has no budget. They make no money off of it. No one does. There are hundreds of similar journals in English literary criticism. That is just one field among thousands in "academia", each with similarly situated journals.
I think this is just a difference between those with exposure to academic presses and those without. Sigh.
Oy. Had you started out talking about the poor obscure downtrodden poetry criticism journals, you would have been fine. But alas, you had to overgeneralize into academic areas you know nothing about, and then proceded from there to step on your dick. So I pointed that out. You're welcome.
I would, BTW, recommend to anybody reading along to look at the WP article on
Elsevier, which contains accounts of entire boards of some of their 2000 journals resigning to found their own competing journals, due to Elsevier's outlandish charges to libraries (which have in turn resulted in libraries refusing subscriptions). These new independent journals will now be free to deal separately with not only JSTOR, but also JSTOR's competitors. Good for everyone. And if the
Journal of Social Text Deconstruction and Keats Study gets clobbered in the process, that's me over there, shedding a great fat tear. (IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/wink.gif)
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill's side.
And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing