Re: copyright expiration as a spur to creativity

On 4 Sep 1998, Michael Scarpitti <mscarpit[_at_]asnt.org> wrote:
>
> Authors already are in a position to negotiate on all the points
> listed by Mr. Henderson, unless the publishers are greedy (never
> happens?) and the authors naive, or don't have good lawyers (I mean
> competent lawyers).

Many research publishers routinely ask authors to pay them subsidies of various kinds, ranging from submission fees to page charges to subventions, because of a poor sales forecast in a market dominated by academic libraries.

Total page charges paid by science authors was estimated for an NSF study at $20 million.

The number of university presses has increased sharply over the last 50 years I believe in order to accommodate the expansion of scholarly communication in spite of the constraints on library purchasing power.

Fred Kameny, editor at U.South Carolina Press, wrote about this in "Authors with deep pockets. The ethics of subsidies." Journal of Scholarly Publishing. 1998. 29,2:65-70. He shows how thin the line is between the practices of vanity publishers and some scholarly presses.

Albert Henderson, Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY <70244.1532[_at_]compuserve.com> Received on Tue Sep 08 1998 - 22:57:20 GMT