From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 08:53:52 -0400

I would be interested to know Heather's view of what the economics of
journal publishing would be were the payments to contributors to
change.  For example, let's suppose a reviewer received $500 per
article, each published article paid $1,000 to the authors
collectively, associate editors earned $25,000 a year, and editors
$100,000 and up.  How much lower would the prices of journals go?

Joe Esposito


On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 7:32 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: Heather Morrison <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 09:48:14 -0700
>
> Interesting article from Al Jazeera English on the increasing
> percentage of faculty (76%) on the adjunct track, many below the
> poverty line, and the potential implications of trends like MOOCs and
> automated grading systems on academic labour:
>
> http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/04/20134119156459616.html
>
> What does this have to do with scholarly publishing? The whole system
> depends on the free gifts (see note) of academics of their articles
> and peer review services, not to mention conduct of research in the
> first place. If the system that supports the researchers is melting
> beneath our feet, what future is there for scholarly publishing, if
> any?
>
> Note: acknowledging that these gifts are not always free, sometimes
> royalties are involved, particularly for books, however even here they
> are so far below actually paying people to do the work and write the
> results that this is still primarily a gift economy for the scholar.
> If you take a sabbatical at partial salary to write a book and get
> royalties amounting to a small fraction of the salary differential,
> both you and your university employer are heavily subsidizing the book
> production.
>
> best,
>
> Dr. Heather G. Morrison
> The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
> http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com