They took a risk so I don’t begrudge them a profit.

When estimating publishers’ profits don’t forget to take into account the many conferences and workshops that are subsidised by this business model.

However, the contract explicitly states that the copyright in academic works (in the sense of books, journal articles and the like) belong to the individual academics as authors and not the university. 

Perhaps other institutions vary (and the OU is, for the most part, a very good employer), but here’s an example of an institution for whom copyright matters a great deal but doesn’t apply it to research works.

http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k77982&tabgroupid=icb.tabgroup143448

We write to communicate an untenable situation facing the Harvard Library. Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive. This situation is exacerbated by efforts of certain publishers (called “providers”) to acquire, bundle, and increase the pricing on journals.

Hmmm… I see you’re talking about humanities, though – my experience is in hard sciences.

As for a “top tier venue”, I’m a bit confused.  Are you saying that your colleagues don’t read open access journals?  Are you somehow prevented from “getting points” because of it?  Is your field really so archaic that articles don’t get read unless they are in the dead tree version in the faculty bathroom?  

I’m being sarcastic, but I would like to understand how it is that you would get fewer or lower quality readers because of it.  Are reputable open access journals exempt from peer review?  Is there some misperception ( or accurate perception ) that they contain lower quality research?  How, exactly, does a smaller audience for your work benefit you in any way other than “Published in XX journal” on your CV at conferences?

Heil five!

http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lg0wgbJ2NW1qaa4h7o1_r3_500.gif

It’s possible, of course, to crowdsource even these remaining things. But I don’t think that’s currently standard editorial practice. 

I watched hardcover & paperback prices steadily rise through the ’80s & ’90s. Inflation, production costs, editorial salaries all had a play to this. Now digital takes away quite a bit of that — even editorial salaries, if authors chose to hire from outside the establishment. Meanwhile, the authors have finally gotten their chance to make money off of their work. I’m not talking about the blockbuster darlings of fiction & nonfiction. The vast majority of writers get a miserly contract from the traditional publishers, and then get zero marketing/ promotional help for their books. No wonder these don’t sell well.

Book prices now and in the future, as digital products, will move up and down depending on the value readers place on their favorite authors’ new or backlisted books. Hurray for the writers! Meanwhile, the book publishers are basically getting what they deserve, for all their greediness (treating writers as employees and oftentimes far worse) and for their poor business acumen.

Mark Beyer
Author of “The Village Wit”
and “What Beauty” (June 2012)
blogs at http://www.bibliogrind.com

Oh wait, this makes too much sense!

It _is_ true that generally, any intellectual output created by the employee of an organization that is a product of his job and created on the boss’ time, is deemed the intellectual property of the organization rather than of the employee. But to my knowledge that is more grounded in common law than in legislation or employment agreements (which hardly ever touch the subject), and I would argue that a judge would not necessarily consider an academic researcher to be subject to the same copyright considerations as a corporate employee. After all, a researcher is often paid out of project-specific grants provided by another funding agency than the university itself, and that makes it a different type of work relationship.

I don’t know where you’ve seen that. I’ve worked at four institutions and never had to sign away copyright.

They are, however, very interested in patents. Because that means money and publications don’t.

As for the eugenics question, my point was that quite early on, actual *geneticists* realized that the goal of eliminating supposed undesirable traits by controlling who could reproduce or not was impossible as there would be many carriers that wouldn’t display the trait yet could pass it on. I’m just tired of people blaming geneticists for eugenics when it general it was non-scientists who were the actual proponents of it.

1.
Is there a tenure requirement that someone write one or more textbooks?  I was aware of the aggressive journal publication requirements, but have a number of tenured acquaintances that have ( to my knowledge, anyway )never written a text book. 

2.
If there is no tenure track requirement, and it actually costs them money, why do it?  Or at a minimum, why not collaborate across the largest pool of colleagues possible to minimize the negative economic consequence of producing a ( presumably ) better or more useful text?  ( I economic terms, time spent writing a text book is time not spent writing grant proposals, or doing research work that *does* pay, so the difference in “less than minimum wage” and their research rate is money lost ).  

3.
If textbook authoring is so difficult and time consuming and unprofitable, why are they so consistently updated with new editions?  

The economist in me says that because, once the first edition is written, subsequent updates are extremely economically efficient ( in terms of hours worked to income derived ), as each update kills the secondary market, and forces an entirely new captive audience to buy the book anew, multiplying his hourly rate by at least 1.5-1.7 for each subsequent edition, significantly more if the number of students requiring the text increased for each edition and the new edition contains little new material ( as often seems to be the case ). 

–added question–

4.
If textbook authorship is instead driven by non-economic factors – a labor of love or professional duty to advance the field – then why go through a traditional publisher at all unless it is for primary or secondary school students? ( in these markets, selection committees cannot be relied upon to have sufficient command of the material to make sound judgements, so the vetting of an established publisher has value )

Ebook and even vanity/on demand publishing can be had at a fraction of the cost of a textbook publisher, on more favorable terms, and in less time. These channels do not preclude peer review, and the buying audience – other experts in your same subject matter – are more than qualified to judge the caliber of your work.

My partner actually had a print management professor that composed a text book on binding and finishing from professional articles he had written across his career, and part of the class grade was binding and finishing their own textbook. To this day, he regards it as one of the most valuable and useful educational experiences of his entire career, and he still uses it for reference on occasion.

This does not begin to touch on the academic text book publishers, but it doesn’t really have to. I find it exceedingly unlikely that they ended up making minimum wage over the life of their books unless they were substandard, or there were significant other non-economic factors that motivated them. In the face of non-economic factors, then whether or not they are being exploited by their publishers becomes a completely different question.

If their printing, indexing, hosting, binding and distribution costs are really that high, then it is because of a failure of the business to remain current with technology and industry norms, NOT because the process is properly, or inherently expensive.  Further, open access provisions do not necessarily require that such things be completely free to all comers, or in all formats.  

Having worked extensively in both printing and as a web monkey, I can tell you for certain that the “costs” associated with producing a PDF from a preflight press file are nearly non-existent, and such a file would meet any of the open access standards in effect today. Ebooks may carry additional overhead, I’ve not dealt with them – but since an open access work has no reason to carry DRM, it really shouldn’t be any more complex than distilling a pdf.  

In terms of hosting and search, there is the cost to set up a decent CMS, but once set up, the additional overhead of updating and maintaining it would be at most 1-2 employees – and only that if the volume was tremendously high. Once installed and configured, the patching, management and administration a properly implemented CMS should add only trivial overhead to your existing maintenance developers and sys admins.