Gerard takes on JSTOR, purt'near calls them liars Options

[thekohser]

David Gerard assesses JSTOR as a "problem that needs dealing with", and he goes on to ponder ways by which the entire "proprietary journal system" could be brought to its knees.

[dtobias]

I still think of the academic publishing industry as worse than the music industry in terms of the money going to people other than those who actually create the works being consumed, and the music industry is pretty bad in this regard: only a small percentage of the cost of a record/CD/MP3 purchased legally goes to actual musicians or songwriters, with most going to management and marketing types. These industries all have in common archaic business models built up in the days when bulky physical objects had to be manufactured and distributed, necessitating all sorts of expensive infrastructure that isn't needed nowadays for electronic distribution. It's notably primarily people connected with this management/marketing/corporate end who are shouting the loudest for draconian protection of intellectual property, supposedly for the sake of the poor starving artists, though they sometimes take such positions over the objection of artists themselves.

The still-useful role of gatekeepers to filter information and distinguish a crank's blog and a garage band's noise from the "good stuff" (however this may be defined) needs to somehow be recreated in the modern world; exactly what form this will take is yet to be determined, but hopefully it won't sap up nearly as much of the resources that go into the industry compared to the writers/artists/performers/researchers themselves.

[Ottava]

I still think of the academic publishing industry as worse than the music industry in terms of the money going to people other than those who actually create the works being consumed

....

How much money do you think is left over after all the printing costs? You forgot that the market is really low. A musician sells to millions of people. An academic might have an audience of 1,000 if they are lucky.

There isn't some corporate fatcat who is running everything in these presses. Most of the editors and the ones publishing -are- the same academics who contributed before. 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.


Milton: "Editorial and layup work is legitimate, but what fraction of the budget goes for that? It's very hard to find out."

Actually, it isn't. Many Academic Universities have publishing houses. Many are public universities. Their expenses are public record. You can find out just how much the people are being paid. I know that the CUA press makes very little, and every one of the staff has a secondary job at the school. You have to remember, for every Oxford University Press there are 10,000 much smaller groups that had to downsize a lot. Even Oxford has taken a big hit.

This post has been edited by Ottava:

[radek]

I still think of the academic publishing industry as worse than the music industry in terms of the money going to people other than those who actually create the works being consumed

....

How much money do you think is left over after all the printing costs? You forgot that the market is really low. A musician sells to millions of people. An academic might have an audience of 1,000 if they are lucky.

There isn't some corporate fatcat who is running everything in these presses. Most of the editors and the ones publishing -are- the same academics who contributed before. 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.


Milton: "Editorial and layup work is legitimate, but what fraction of the budget goes for that? It's very hard to find out."

Actually, it isn't. Many Academic Universities have publishing houses. Many are public universities. Their expenses are public record. You can find out just how much the people are being paid. I know that the CUA press makes very little, and every one of the staff has a secondary job at the school. You have to remember, for every Oxford University Press there are 10,000 much smaller groups that had to downsize a lot. Even Oxford has taken a big hit.

He's not saying the editors make money - usually they don't make any. He's saying the publisher makes money. And it's not true that "there is very little money in academic publishing at any end" (though I guess it depends on your definition of "very little"). While there aren't millions of fans who snatch up the individual issues, institutional sales (libraries etc). can bring in some nice dough.

And there have been cases of academic organizations "rebelling" against money-grubbing publishers. Can't remember off the top of my head but IIRC Elsevier had some problems with uppity academics once or twice.

As far as JSTOR goes, I don't think they're part of the problem. If you're an academic you get access to it for free anyway - and you're the intended audience. It's really the interested amateur that gets screwed but there's honestly not that many of those, and they can always take a trip to the library.

But Milton's also right about lack of competition in the journal publishing industry - though it's more of a oligopoly than a monopoly. And dtobias is right that to some extent these companies are following an outdated business model based on shipping thick paper books. But in the end the way it shows up is just in the utterly stupefying inefficiency of the acceptance-publication process (better in some areas than others). In some disciplines it's considered "amateurish" to even inquire about what's going on with your submission before nine months - nine fucking months - have passed. This has further implications - tenure becomes a lot more uncertain; even if you've submitted quite a bit, the roulette wheel is not going to be spun until two years later or something, so who the hell knows how you'll come out when that clock gets close to midnight.

(Edit: not to mention that getting a revise/resubmit two years after you wrote something is something of a joke - who can remember what they were thinking exactly two years ago?)

This post has been edited by radek:

[Ottava]

He's not saying the editors make money - usually they don't make any. He's saying the publisher makes money. And it's not true that "there is very little money in academic publishing at any end" (though I guess it depends on your definition of "very little"). While there aren't millions of fans who snatch up the individual issues, institutional sales (libraries etc). can bring in some nice dough.

Sorry, but that is just not true. Most publishers don't make money from academic work, and many journals are published on demand (hence the high prices) according to the wishes of the editors, as the editors are the ones who started and run most journals and a small print shop is all that exists of a "publisher".

Your confusion is like thinking Hollywood is the majority of movie making while ignoring that the vast majority are two guys with a cheap camera running around. We don't even have a Hollywood in academia publishing.

[Milton Roe]

He's not saying the editors make money - usually they don't make any. He's saying the publisher makes money. And it's not true that "there is very little money in academic publishing at any end" (though I guess it depends on your definition of "very little"). While there aren't millions of fans who snatch up the individual issues, institutional sales (libraries etc). can bring in some nice dough.

Sorry, but that is just not true. Most publishers don't make money from academic work, and many journals are published on demand (hence the high prices) according to the wishes of the editors, as the editors are the ones who started and run most journals and a small print shop is all that exists of a "publisher".

Your confusion is like thinking Hollywood is the majority of movie making while ignoring that the vast majority are two guys with a cheap camera running around. We don't even have a Hollywood in academia publishing.

The closest to scientific publishing Hollywood would be Elsevier, which publishes 2000 journals out of 70 offices in 24 countries. Also about 1900 books a year. They have 7000 employees and annual revenues of 1.5 billion pounds (US $2.43 billion). That's not in the Hollywood league of course, but neither is it chump change, and it completely gives the lie to the idea that there's no money in academic publishing. I don't really care what "most" scientific publishers make. How do you even define a scientific publisher? You can say it's two guys in a garage and claim that "most" don't make money. However, the journals that have a high impact factor are published by people like Elsevier and NPG (Nature Publishing Group). The last is a Macmillan division that publishes ~30 journals, so I cannot find out its finances, but if Elsevier makes a profit, I think it's safe to say that NPG does also. University libraries are starting to boycott Elsevier's prices, in fact.

Springer is another interesting German company that does mostly science books and high end science texts and reference books (no journals). Also some econ, law and social science stuff, but it's all heavily academic, and they look at author-credentials with a very heavy hand. They make $1.25 billion a year.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/commonsbasedr...th_focus_on_BGP
http://company.monster.com/elsevi.aspx

[Ottava]

The closest to scientific publishing Hollywood would be Elsevier, which publishes 2000 journals out of 70 offices in 24 countries. Also about 1900 books a year. They have 7000 employees and annual revenues of 1.5 billion pounds (US $2.43 billion). That's not in the Hollywood league of course, but neither is it chump change, and it completely gives the lie to the idea that there's no money in academic publishing. I don't really care what "most" scientific publishers make. How do you even define a scientific publisher? You can say it's two guys in a garage and claim that "most" don't make money. However, the journals that have a high impact factor are published by people like Elsevier and NPG (Nature Publishing Group). The last is a Macmillan division that publishes ~30 journals, so I cannot find out its finances, but if Elsevier makes a profit, I think it's safe to say that NPG does also. University libraries are starting to boycott Elsevier's prices, in fact.

Springer is another interesting German company that does mostly science books and high end science texts and reference books (no journals). Also some econ, law and social science stuff, but it's all heavily academic, and they look at author-credentials with a very heavy hand. They make $1.25 billion a year.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/commonsbasedr...th_focus_on_BGP
http://company.monster.com/elsevi.aspx

....

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.

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 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.

This post has been edited by Ottava: