Journal Article Royalties: Reanimating the "Faustian Bargain"
Re: Chris Armstrong's Questions About "One Subversion Too Far"
http://www.text-e.org/debats/
Stevan Harnad
I think Chris does an excellent job of answering his own questions
(q.v.), his accompanying perplexity (with PostGutenberg reality for the
special, anomalous literature of give-away refereed research in
question) notwithstanding!
See:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0381.html
Bref: Not only is there (1) a profoundly asymmetric trade-off between
refereed-research authors' maximized potential-impact income (from
eliminating all online access barriers to potential users of their
research) and any direct imprint income (royalties) that they could be
offered to induce them to give up that potential-impact maximization
and instead retain the current access barriers (this is the heart of
the "Faustian Bargain" in the PostGutenberg conflict of interest
between these anomalous researcher/authors and their publishers), but
even if there existed such an amount at which many such authors could
be bought off, (2) the potential GROSS revenues from the collective
sales of any given article (averaging about $2000 from its portion of
worldwide subscription/license/pay-per-view revenues) are far too low
to provide it (as a percentage of the gross)!
Researchers might ask themselves: How much money would I have to be
paid per refereed research article to renounce free access to my
research findings for all potential users?
Harnad, S. (1995) The PostGutenberg Galaxy: How To Get There From Here.
Information Society 11(4) 285-292. Also appeared in: Times Higher
Education Supplement. Multimedia. P. vi. May 12 1995.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/THES/thes.html
Harnad, S. (1995) Sorting the Esoterica from the Exoterica: There's
Plenty of Room in Cyberspace: Response to Fuller. Information Society
11(4) 305-324. Also appeared in: Times Higher Education Supplement.
Multimedia. P. vi. June 9 1995.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/THES/harful1.html
Stevan Harnad, mardi 20 novembre 19:41 (heure de Paris)
http://www.text-e.org/debats/
Received on Thu Nov 22 2001 - 04:41:48 GMT