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

[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.