Stevan Harnad's misconception 6

From: Velterop, Jan, Springer UK <Jan.Velterop_at_SPRINGER.COM>
Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 18:04:01 +0100

Misconception: If an author 'pays' for the services of a publisher by
handing over rights, that payment is in addition to subscription
charges.

Stevan Harnad must not have understood what I said, and it's entirely
possible that I wasn't clear enough. Mea culpa.

No, Stevan, you can't just add these. Let me try to explain it again.
The author 'pays' by transferring rights, these rights only represent
'potential' money. This 'potential' money has to be converted into
'actual' money for the publisher to be able to pay his bills. That's
what subscriptions do, the convert rights into money.

Why exclusive rights? 'Exclusive' here means that the same article may
not be published in more than one journal. Virtually everybody in the
scientific establishment agrees with that principle. Not absolutely
everybody. Some articles appear in more than one journal. When this
happens, it is frowned upon, even regarded as scientific fraud.

As for royalties to the author, of course they are given, if the
publisher really wants to publish the work because in his judgement he
can sell it well. For instance textbooks, or good review-articles. For
research articles this doesn't apply, because it's not up to the
publisher to decide which article to publish and which not. Just as
well. Editors and editorial boards - scientists - decide, on the basis
of scientific merit, not financial potential. This is as true for
subscription-based journals as it is for OA journals and hybrid ones.

Jan Velterop

> -----Original Message-----
> From: SPARC Open Access Forum [mailto:SPARC-OAForum_at_arl.org]
> On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
> Sent: 28 February 2007 04:09
> To: SPARC Open Access Forum
> Subject: [SOAF] Reply to Jan Velterop, and a Challenge to
> "OA" Publishers Who Oppose Mandating OA via Self-Archiving
>
> ** Cross-Posted **
>
[cut]
>
> > On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Velterop, Jan, Springer UK wrote:
> >
> > transfer of exclusive rights to a publisher is a form of
> > 'payment'. Payment for the services of a publisher.
>
> Is that so? And then what are subscription revenues? A fringe benefit?
>
> (I would have thought that assigning a publisher the right to
> publish and the exclusive right to collect revenues for
> selling an author's work, without even paying any royalties
> to the author, was "payment"
> enough for the value added by the publisher...)
>
> > The publisher subsequently uses these exclusive rights to
> sell > subscriptions > and licences in order to recoup his costs
>
> Why exclusive rights?
>
> > The advantage is seemingly for the author, who >
> (mistakenly) has the feeling that he doesn't have to pay for
> the > services of formal publication of his article, but who
> seldom realizes > why he is asked to transfer exclusive rights.
>
> Authors are naive, but not quite as foolish as that. They
> know the publisher needs to sell subscriptions to make ends
> meet. But what you haven't explained is why the publisher
> needs *exclusive* rights in order to do that.
>
[cut]
Received on Wed Feb 28 2007 - 19:15:41 GMT