From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2013 23:35:46 -0600

Ken Masters wrote:

>There is an article in the Chronicle on Aaron Swartz.  The title is
>"Aaron Swartz was right."  As far as I can tell, the article defends
>Swartz's feelings, and, perhaps even his actions.  I get that sense
>from the snippet of the article's opening paragraph, and from the
>blurb sent in the advertising mail: "The current academic publishing
>system is prettied-up extortion. He defied it, and the rest of us
>should too."
>
>So, why haven't I read the entire article?  Because the Chronicle's
>article dealing with the way in which "academic publishing system is
>prettied-up extortion" and arguing that we should defy it, is, itself,
>locked behind the Chronicle's pay-wall.  And I wonder if they are
>aware of the irony.  Unfortunately, probably not.
>
>For those of you who have paid your dues ("extortion", quoting the
>blurb), or who are at institutions who have paid their dues, the
>article is at:
>
>http://chronicle.com/article/Aaron-Swartz-Was-Right/137425/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
>
>Regards
>
>Ken

I just posted the following reply to this article:

This article is based on such basic misunderstandings of the
publishing business that I hardly know where to begin.  Mr. Ludlow
appears to be in the same boat here as Mr. Swartz, who clearly also
did not know much of what he was talking about. I hope that Mr. Ludlow
approaches the writing of his own books with more care than he
displays here.

1) Mr. Ludlow, like Mr. Swartz, appears to be unaware of the various
programs in which commercial publishers like Elsevier participate to
make their journals accessible at no cost to universities in
underdeveloped countries.

2) He seems not to realize that the vast majority of JSTOR content
comes from non-profit publishers like societies and university
presses, not from commercial publishing giants like Elsevier.

3) He seems completely oblivious to the fact that Project Muse, which
is a joint project of the library and university press at Johns
Hopkins, includes alumni access to its entire journals database for no
premium charge. And he didn't seem to be aware, before a commenter
pointed out, that alumni access to JSTOR can be purchased by libraries
at a very modest extra cost.

4)  Mr. Ludlow claims that hardly any faculty receive even a dime from
publication of articles. Perhaps he would be interested to know that
when I was director at Penn State University Press, which publishes
several leading journals in his own field of philosophy, we regularly
sent out checks to authors of articles representing income from
various subsidiary rights sources including republication in
commercial anthologies, use in coursepacks, and copying done in
foreign countries.  Some authors received tens of thousands of dollars
in such payments for single articles.

5)  The NEH funds a very small fraction of the research published in
the humanities. Perhaps Mr. Ludlow is not familiar with how small a
budget the NEH has-just $14.5 million for research grants in FY 2012.
Very little of what appears in journals included in the JSTOR database
received funding from the NSF.

6) Publishers have never opposed the publication of the findings of
government research paid for by taxpayers. In fact, they have
encouraged federal agencies all to post reports of such funded
research immediately upon their receipt and to mandate the submission
of such reports as a condition for receiving public funding. What
publishers have complained about is the government's uncompensated
taking of journal articles based on the research to which publishers
have contributed value.

7) Mr. Ludlow doesn't seem to be aware that some two-thirds of journal
publishers (including Penn State University Press) permit the posting
of green OA versions of articles appearing in their journals on
authors' own web sites or the repositories of their institutions.

8) Mr. Ludlow never stops to consider why Mr. Swartz would want to
hurt university presses like the one that published his two books.
These presses do not charge "exorbitant" subscription fees and do not
generate large profits for shareholders, since they have none. He
mentions the University of Chicago Press in derogatory terms,
apparently unaware that this press contributes over $1 million a year
from its surplus to the university's general operating fund.

9) If he thinks university presses are somehow playing with authors
unfairly, he might want to ask why it is that administrators at
universities that support presses require that they recover, on
average, about 90% of their operating costs through sales in the
marketplace.  That presses have not moved more rapidly toward
open-access publishing is not something they have chosen on their own
to do. And why does he think that an author transferring his copyright
to another university is such a terrible thing to do? Is such an
author being unfairly exploited by the recipient university?

10) In characterizing Mr. Swartz's act as "civil disobedience," Mr.
Ludlow has ignored a lot of what his fellow philosophers have written
about that kind of activity. He might want to refresh himself on the
literature by reading this entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/civil-disobedience.

11) Although Mr. Swartz was prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and
Abuse Act, he could have been prosecuted under the No Electronic Theft
Act if he had carried through with his evident plan of posting the
JSTOR articles to the open Internet. Congress passed this act in 1997
in the wake of the act of an MIT student named David LaMacchia, who
had posted copyrighted software to his bulletin board for everyone to
download, without any aim of personally profiting from this activity.
Does Mr. Ludlow consider this to be an unjust law, and if so, perhaps
he could tell us why?

Sanford G. Thatcher
Director Emeritus, Penn State University Press
8201 Edgewater Drive
Frisco, TX  75034-5514
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