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

[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.)