From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2013 18:34:32 -0500

In STM journals you're right that probably the majority of articles
are written by multiple authors. That is certainly NOT true for
journals in the humanities. Social sciences fall somewhere in between,
I'd say. But I'm not sure why this would be a problem, since book
co-authors and co-editors are generally paid royalties and shares of
subsidiary rights.

I'm not sure what length has to do with it either. if you look at a
typical anthology in philosophy, for example, you'll see that the
great majority of the contents are reprinted journal articles, rather
than excerpts from books.

No doubt the main reason for the difference in treatment,
historically, is that the cost of tracking subsidiary rights income
for journal authors--especially for publishers with large numbers of
journals and hence large numbers of authors--was considered excessive
in relation to the benefits likely to accrue to any authors.  My guess
is that this kind of cost is much less with fully automated tracking
systems, though it no doubt remains true that the vast majority of
journal authors would not make a great deal of money from the sharing
of such income.

Sandy



> From: Anthony Watkinson <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2013 12:51:32 +0100
>
> Dear Sandy
>
> If you read my post again I did say "rarely". I imagine that it is because
> journal articles often have a number of authors and also are much shorter
> than a book. It is usually the same with authors in multi-authored books. It
> is also because publishers do not usually have a royalty arrangement with
> either group. To give all these people a share must have been at a
> considerable cost in the past for very little income.
>
> Anthony
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 9 Apr 2013 00:21:05 -0500
>
> It is not universally true that revenues from reprint and other subsidiary
> rights sales are not shared with authors of journal articles.  In this
> respect, at Penn State University Press, we treated our journal authors in
> the same way as we treated our book authors, sharing income from most
> subsidiary rights 50/50. We are not the only publisher that pursued this
> practice either. It is not clear to me why most publishers decided not to
> treat journal and book authors the same way. Perhaps some other publisher
> can explain the rationale for the difference in treatment.
>
> Sandy Thatcher