Here is a comment I left over on the Chronicle for Higher Education about the Schwartz case.
Reading through the comments it seems like there are a few misconceptions about publishing Journal articles that people might not know. I have never met anyone who got paid by an academic journal to publish. (If those people exist, I’d like to meet them, or at least talk to them.) Academics must sign away their copyright to the journal if they want it to be included. I will never get the rights to any of my papers back and technically, I cannot copy them for my classes (or friends classes) without violating copyright laws. I was not paid for the publications. I just got an extra line on my CV.
Reviewers also generally do not get paid for reviewing articles either. Generally they do it as a favor to a professor who has helped them, plus, reviewers get the line in their CVs as reward. I haven’t spoken to those who act as editors for “Special Supplements” to journals, but I expect that they don’t get paid either. The only people catching any cash in this system are the publishers.
It seems the JSTOR is only covering expenses as a not-for-profit, so again the money is going back to the publishers.
So, If Mr. Schwartz were to have actually had any of my articles tucked into that 4.8 million documents, good on him. The academics who WROTE those papers weren’t seeing anything resembling cash out of it anyway. Prestige perhaps, but no money. In general, I don’t do the research for the paper anyway. I do the research but I want to find out what is happening in the system I am studying. I write the paper/article so others can see what I did and help me find flaws in research designs or for them to continue down a path I didn’t examine. I don’t get paid for research. I don’t get paid for articles. And the vast majority of academics are just like me. The research is in addition to everything else I do. Oh, and If I do happen to get a grant, my field generally doesn’t allow that money to go towards my salary. But the grant money doesn’t come from publishers anyway, it comes from government and institutions.
A thought about textbooks based on ordinary_man’s comment… Publishers generally take the lion’s share of those books anyway. A new author is lucky to see $2 on a $25 textbook. There are precious few that make ANY money publishing textbooks. In general, I see those people still keeping their teaching jobs, I wonder if there’s a correlation in there…. But the good news is that those aren’t ordinary_man’s textbooks anymore. Because, the basic assumption for textbooks, like articles, is that the author signs away the copyright until the book has been out of print for a minimum of five years. If authors get a better deal, more power to them.
Don’t sign away your copyright. At least license it so that you get it back immediately if the publisher decides not to print any more of your book. There are options now. Self publishing isn’t going to pay you any less for your writing and you might actually make a modest amount of money on it. (And I do mean modest.) You can always hire an editor and cover designer. If you don’t want the hassle, great, go to a publisher. But don’t imagine you are going to get a better deal there.
I applaud Mr. Schwartz. I would like to see JSTOR support themselves, but not at the expense it takes to print a class set of articles. I lay the blame on the publishers. This is not the recording or movie industry. They are not actually producing the material. Academics are donating it and the time it takes to do the research and write it up.
