In which JSTOR is a vanity press

[ysabetwordsmith]

It turns out that the famous academic journal JSTOR charges authors a fee  if they want their published article to be free to the public, not locked into JSTOR's pay-for-use system.  The main reason to publish in JSTOR is peer recognition; i.e. "for the luv."  There's a rule in the writing world that money always flows TO the author FROM the publisher, never in reverse; and that publications which violate that rule are vanity presses.  It's not necessarily an absolute, but it's very widely held.

I have to wonder how much damage JSTOR's precious reputation would take if that practice were widely known.  And since I spotted it in an article about a legal battle over information rights in which someone was more or less hounded to death, I thought I'd mention this part.  Authors do the work; JSTOR pockets the subscription money.  Surely there could be a better model than this.

Comments

[jenett]

Academic publishing is *weird*, and a lot of the standard assumptions about how writing works (or should work) do not necessarily apply.

(or at least, they have not historically.)

What JSTOR does is absolutely standard practice in academic journals. (and actually, most of the journals collected in JSTOR are a lot better than some, where you not only have to pay for public access to your article, but you have to pay - substantial amounts of money, usually - to get the thing published in the first place: the examples I've heard are especially true in science journals, which is not my field of expertise.)

It's also worth noting that JSTOR is not a journal in and of itself: it is an aggregator of many journals, with issues going way back in some cases (i.e. well out of copyright) as well as new and constantly updated material. Indexing and making those materials available does also have costs associated with it, and they do a lot of standardisation work, some of which can take substantial human-hours to deal with. (Which is to say: I am not convinced that the *amount* of their fees is where it should be, but the fact there are fees in the first place, well, maybe. Since they serve scans of the journal text, the bandwidth is noticeably higher than, say, plain HTML would be.)

Academic authors are generally aware of it (or rather, it takes a complete studied avoidance of the topic *not* to be aware of it). And no one's really happy with it.

It's also complicated to say that academic authors do it for peer recognition. Which is to say, they do, but the actual *benefits* to writing an academic article (as opposed to other forms of communication, like, say, blogging for a more general audience, which a number of academics also do as well) are all tied up with publishing requirements in their field and institution, and they're writing for a very small audience of peers in their academic fields who have the ability to make decisions about their professional careers.

Making the work more generally available is cool - and one should argue, the point of scholarship - but a) many articles aren't written with a general audience in mind and may not be much direct use to people who are not widely read in that specific subfield and b) it's much more a side benefit than the primary purpose. Some academics care about making the original article available. Others may do something like recraft their information for a general audience via a blog, public presentations, or other materials. (And some publish because they have to for tenure or promotion, but don't really want to expand on a given article beyond that.)

There is a growing movement for open access journals and materials: it's playing out in lots of complicated ways in the library discussions I read, and I suspect it's going to be another 5-10 years before there's really lasting substantial movement on it. Academia moves very slowly on some things, and in this case, I think it's going to take a bunch of people getting tenure *partly* based on open-access journals, having the open access model prove reliable and stable, and then being in positions to push their institutions toward more of that in ways that non-tenured faculty can't easily risk (especially in the current economic climate.) Which all takes a while.

(Right now, we are mostly in the "wrangle a lot over whether open access actually improves the scholarly process" (you'd think it would, *but* there are a bunch of questions about how you tell, and what it means for both non-tenured and tenured academics. I know a number of people in tenure-track positions who are doing things like committing to do their best to get one article in a (reputable) open access journal in their field, but recognising that the others need to be in longstanding primary journals in the field, most of which are not yet open access. Over time, that will give data on a bunch of things.)

[melannen]

+1

Not as well submerged in this subject as you (and as a non-academic who frequently bounces off JSTOR paywalls while trying to learn about stuff, or to verify unsupported statements made in the science press or blog posts, would argue strenuously against the "may not be much direct use to the public") but I'll add that the "pay to publish" model is part of the largest open-access journals, too.

I had the same "pay to publish = bad" reaction as you, ysabet, when I first learned that PLoS ONE is pay-to-publish, but academic publishing has a very different set of goals and incentives than the rest of the publication world - the authors have never been meant to be making money directly from their writing - and it actually makes more sense to do pay-to-publish than to make the readers pay, if someone has to.

(Of course the ones that are pay-to-publish and pay-per-view are another kettle of fish entirely. As are many, many other skeevy things that academic publishers have been known to do with regards to money, gatekeeping, intellectual property, academic ethics, etc.)

[cadenzamuse]

+1 I'm as frustrated as the next ex-academic about no longer having access to ALL THE SCIENCE through institution-paid pay-to-view databases and journals, and yes, JSTOR's model might be slightly exploitative (I, heh, don't have enough data to make an opinion and I don't care enough to go scrape up the data right now), but it's really an "everybody in academic publishing does it" thing.

Although, something that I think is relevant to part of ysabetwordsmith's original point is the "science gap," which Jorge Cham does a really good job of discussing at TEDxUCLA here.

[avendya]

Caveat: it depends on the field re. open-access journals. Physics is quite good at having open-access papers (♥ the arXiv) and pay-to-access is more the exception than the rule; biology is significantly worse.

[kaz]

Us mathematicians are very ♥ about the arXiv too, although I think it hasn't permeated the culture to quite the same degree yet.

[kaz]

+1 from a current PhD student who has not published but reads papers regularly for work and has heard things via academic gossip. Trying to apply standards for commercial publishing to academic will really, really not work. I have definitely never in any subject heard of academics being paid for publishing papers the way it's true outside academia; the "money flows TO the author" rule quite simply does not apply. Instead, you support yourself from grants, publish for free (or in some subjects, pay money to publish - maths doesn't really do this) and the publication record is pretty much the thing people look at when hiring or considering you for a grant. Refusing to publish in journals would be career suicide for a young academic. So publishing does confer an essential intangible benefit although not money.

The system is WEIRD but hard to change because it's always been this way; the main protest from academics is less not being paid for their work (because it's the culture, because academics get money from grants instead, and as said you do get "paid" in the form of CV) and more about other people making a profit off their work + having their work not be open to the public because of paywalls. Insofar as I understand the open access debate, JSTOR's model can be viewed as an improvement: it is at least possible for open access to happen, even though the burden is disproportionately on the authors. Frequently it isn't possible at all!

The ideal, of course, is having all content available online for free, but there are issues with hosting and admin costs and the like. There are also models such as "available online for free 6 months after publication" or preprint archives. In the US, if I understand correctly, it's actually a legal requirement that tax payer-funded medical research be made available for free on Pubmed, and there's been lobbies to have that extended to all tax payer-funded research. Also, some people are attempting a boycott of Elsevier, which is one of the most extortionate journal companies.

Also, agreeing that JSTOR isn't a journal but an aggregate website!

eta: publishing books is another thing, but for maths at least that's not too usual anyway.

[oursin]

As far as I know, it's not JSTOR doing the charging - it's the scholarly journal publishers, who already make huge sums out of selling subscriptions to libraries (while getting free peer reviewing etc from scholarly community). I'm still appalled (especially when I get journal editors asking me to pay vast amounts to have short reviews made Open Access), but if a journal is in JSTOR, if you're a member of a subscribing library you should be able to access articles free.

But 'Open Access' is a minefield at the moment because of the way it's being implemented and because the big-name journals in most fields are produced by large publishing conglomerates (often many stages down the line from when they were originally established as a forum for scholarly communication)

[smw]

Aw, damn. I hate to hear when a resource I have enjoyed immensely is doing assy things.

[cmcmck]

I write for a number of academic journals and none of them pull this trick.

Highly dodgy, I'd say.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

this is true of nearly all academic publishing: you write a science paper, the journal publishes it, the authors get nada. has been so since time immemorial; as authors we are to regard ourselves as scientists and not writers (reasonable enough a descriptor a lot of the time :) the reward was to survive the "publish or perish" thing and maintain one's academic standing and/or progress; the researcher was paid by the university or other funding institution.

(this past year i was first author on a chapter in a medical-school textbook that sells for over a hundred dollars a pop. i'll never see a dime, and it may or may not help my professional life. i regard it as charity work; it's a way to do good in the world.)

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Recently I read that a controversial study had been released into the wild, free at the author's own website, by-passing the whole 'journal review' process. Back to an earlier custom where it could be reviewed by everyone, peers and non-peers alike, instead of going through a journal as gate-keeper. (Maybe this was BEST, re climate change?)

Anyway, another point would be, does JSTOR get exclusive rights, or can a researcher publish both at JSTOR and elsewhere?