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

[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.