Why are academics not paid royalties on published research papers in IEEE, ACM etc.?

Question

I understand that academics are not paid a single dime on their publications. In my field (computer science), IEEE, ACM, Springer, Elsevier are some known journals/publications and none of them pay authors any royalties but they charge the readers a substantial amount of money per paper.

I'm a new PhD student so please bear with me if there is something obvious that I am missing here. I was told by my advisor that to graduate I need to publish in IEEE or ACM. He did not suggest, and I do not know of any reputed journal in my field, that either pays royalties to authors or allows free access to readers. I am forced to publish my papers at IEEE or ACM if I want to graduate and find a job afterwards.

My questions:

• Why are PhD students, professors, and others who publish their life's works in professional research publications not paid royalties on their hard work poured into these papers?

• If academics choose not to make money (e.g. they are not greedy and want to promote free education for all) shouldn't these publications not charge readers an absurd $30 for 6-7 page paper? Shouldn't the publications charge a nominal fee that covers paying their employees and distributions cost, but nothing more. Right now, it's a trillion dollar profit industry. Why are the publications pocketing all of the profits on research done by scientists? And why is the research community OK with this?

• If this really is an issue (Aaron Swartz -- famous hacktivist -- fought against this injustice), what can be done against this issue by the research community and academics? For example, if researchers at top institutions (in my field) such as MIT, Berkeley etc. boycotted publications that do not pay researchers AND charge the readers (thus pocketing all profits), can this issue be rectified? Can PhD students and professors start submitting to other journals that either pay royalties or be free to readers?

Please help a new PhD student from an underdeveloped country understand this issue. In my country, a lot of the people never go to universities or colleges (thus have no discounted university access to these papers) but are very bright and could use them.

UPDATE:

Although, I think I was clear in the original text above, from one answer here it seems I am coming off as "naive" asking journals to make papers free access AND pay royalties -- a clearly unsustainable business model. No. I am asking for either this OR that. Either pay fair royalties to authors OR make their papers free access (maybe charge readers a nominal fee to cover publishing and distribution costs). I just do not understand why it is justified for publishers to pocket billions of dollars of profit.

UPDATE 2:

Since I said in my original post above that I am a PhD student and there might be a connection I am missing due to my inexperience, I am now adding other sources (e.g. posts by senior professors) that are relevant to this discussion:

• Some of my students asked me yesterday who profits from the egregious pricing structure of academic journals. The only answer I could give them was: publishers like Taylor & Francis, Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, et al.

  As noted by The Economist, Elsevier made $1.1 billion in profit in 2010 for a profit margin of 36%; Taylor & Francis’s profit margin was 25%. In 2011, Elsevier and its senior executives made 31 contributions to members of the U.S. House of Representatives, of which 12 went to NY Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, who sponsored something called the Research Works Act (RWA), a bill that would it illegal for the government to make taxpayer-funded research openly accessible to the public.

  http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2013/01/16/the-state-of-academic-publishing-rip-aaron-swartz/

• Brian Nosek, a professor at the University of Virginia and director of the Center for Open Science, says, “Academic publishing is the perfect business model to make a lot of money. You have the producer and consumer as the same person: the researcher. And the researcher has no idea how much anything costs.” Nosek finds this whole system is designed to maximize the amount of profit. “I, as the researcher, produce the scholarship and I want it to have the biggest impact possible and so what I care about is the prestige of the journal and how many people read it. Once it is finally accepted, since it is so hard to get acceptances, I am so delighted that I will sign anything — send me a form and I will sign it. I have no idea I have signed over my copyright or what implications that has — nor do I care, because it has no impact on me. The reward is the publication.”

  https://medium.com/@jasonschmitt/can-t-disrupt-this-elsevier-and-the-25-2-billion-dollar-a-year-academic-publishing-business-aa3b9618d40a

UPDATE 3:

I would like to once again stress that I realize that publishers need to cover costs and even make a bit of profit. I am not against that. I understand that businesses exist to make profit. But if certain publishing houses are making excess profit of billions while paying nothing back to the authors, how is that fair? There is no problem with the journal covering their costs. My question is: are they just covering their costs or are they making a substantial/hefty profit which is leading to an elite few at the top (maybe shareholders of publishing house) getting very rich? It seems they are making billions of dollars in profit -- after covering all distribution, publication and other costs.

Please note that I am merely looking to understand the issue better and have no preconceived notions such as "publishers are evil".

Answer 1

The short answer is: we let publishers profit off of our work because many of us are egocentrics seeking prestige. At least it was the major reason at the creation of the modern academic publishing system. The rest of us can do little to change this, since our careers depend on it.

However, I think this could change soon since more and more academics are realising the same thing as you realised soon in your career: we do not need greedy publishers to do science and this wheel must be broken. Read about the German and French cases against Elsevier/Springer Nature [1, 2, 3, 4].

Before the existence of modern scientific journals, academics used to publish via universities' local presses. At some point, someone had a great idea: invite academics to publish in a journal where only the best would be allowed to publish and then sell it to universities. Academics accepted that because they wanted the prestige of their work being part of the hall of the best publications. Universities accepted to pay because they wanted access to high quality publications. For a more comprehensive history of academic publishing, please read 5, 6 and 7.

The system must change. Today, publishers have little monopolies over scientific knowledge. If you want a specific article you only have one seller that could sell it - that is not fair. Countries are paying a high cost to fund research and then pay again for the product of their own funding. This is just madness.

The problem of changing this goes around the metric used today to evaluate academics. If you are a researcher you need to submit to the system, publish in high impact factor journals and feed this ugly industry - otherwise you can not step up in your career. Governments are trying to change things demanding academics to submit the final version of papers into local repositories and asking to prioritise publishing in open access journals when possible.

Answer 2

The reason why someone can't just make an open free journal which competes away the for profit closed journals is there is a complicated "ratings" system. Journals are rated by how many top authors publish in the journals and how many citations articles in the journal receive. Of course the reverse is also true, an academic will be judged as a top author by what journal they publish in. Since this is a very strong positive feedback loop, it is difficult for any of the free and open journals to become popular. In addition, universities pay for access to these journals. Generally, students and faculty of most universities get access to most of the top journals so most readers of academic articles aren't paying $30/paper, they're paying nothing. It would be difficult for a university to decide to stop paying for these subscriptions because academics want to focus on their field not focus on starting a complete shift of how publishing is done. If the university stopped subscribing to journals then all their good professors would go to universities which still provide journal access.

Basically to get rid of the system, you need a critical mass of professors/researchers to abandon the top journals all at once in favor of some other open and free journal. It doesn't work if only a few people want to abandon the system, they basically won't be able to abandon it unless everyone does it at once.

Answer 3

This is just how this business works. Publishers started doing important things scientists could not do pre-Internet: Organizing peer review, typesetting, making figures, printing, distribution, marketing, archiving.

Now there is no real reason to keep doing it the old way except "that is how it has always been". Anyone can self publish and get peer-reviewed from a self-organized light-weight process.

I have never followed the "chase the highest-ranking journal" game - the journal that fits the scope of the paper best, and provides good Open Access options, usually wins. (Elsevier journals need not apply). The journal and author ranking metrics like Impact Factor are seriously flawed and bordering to pointless. Yet "it is a well-known metric, so we'll use it rather than nothing" still influence even junior authors who then end up propagating the old, pointless practices.

Answer 4

Perhaps this question will soon be closed as a duplicate ... But if not, here are my comments.

If you want to get lots of money, do not choose "academic" as a career.

Publishing your research is valuable to you if it helps you get into a better school, get a better job, get a promotion, get a raise. For that reason, academics are happy to get their work published; they may even be happy to pay a fee to have it done!

You, as an academic, can try to choose only journals where you do not have to pay, and where readers do not have to pay. This is easier now than in the past, but still not very easy in many fields. If your research is supported by a research grant, you may be able to get the grant to pay for publication and free access.

Answer 5

I'm a master student and I worked part-time at my local French university library, so I know a bit about this problem without being an expert either.

Universities libraries really have no love left for Springer and Elsevier. When you are at a University, you can read the paper in the database your university bought the access to. This access cost is really high, to the point where my university decided to stop buying access to Springer a few years ago. There is also a negotiation crisis at the moment between the CNRS (the highest French research institution) and Springer. Every high ranked librarian I've spoken to hates these platforms (they call them 'parasites editors') and have wild dreams about leaving the "double pay" system.

Meanwhile, in my CS field, you have more and more open access solutions :

• HAL is a French platform. Depending on your state funding, you research may have to be published there, whether or not it was published by a private editor. So you could find some Springer & Elsevier publications there (max delay : 6 months after publication). I do not know if the same system exists in other countries.

• Open access conferences. Many of them are really prestigious in my field (CVPR for example). Whether or not you want to publish "ethically", you have a lot of famous conferences to choose from.

Times are changing !

Answer 6

Technically, most authors cannot ask royalties on the sales because they gave up all their rights on their own work: publishers often force authors to give away their copyright with a copyright transfer agreement. (Is it even legal? Maybe not.)

The legal defense is to at least use a SPARC author addendum or other, or better publish in open access (preferably with the pre-print in CC-BY) so that your work cannot be taken away.

The practical defense is to only publish with journals which respect the authors' rights. Aside from fully open access journals (which can work in various ways), some toll-access and hybrid publishers are better than others, but not much.

Answer 7

It's all about brand reputation. People will pay more to watch a movie by a well known director, or to watch a football team with well known star players, or to download software from a company whose name they recognise, or to read an article in a "reputable" publication. The leading publishers like Elsevier and Wiley have built a brand reputation that you don't have if you publish on your personal web site. That reputation gives you career brownie points when you publish in those journals, and the publishers capitalise on that. Of course, they have to work to make sure their reputation is not compromised: but the way the academic system works, that is achieved largely by engaging unpaid reviewers.

Like any system where you pay a premium for using a recognised brand, you can regard it as a racket. Why should Avis be able to charge more than Joe Bloggs car rental, for exactly the same product? In the end, because people like you and me are prepared to pay more (a lot more) to go with someone we trust.

What's different about academic publishing is that the service they provide is primarily to authors rather than readers. As you have yourself indicated, academic authors strive to write and publish papers whether or not anyone is interested in reading them. Sometimes this leads to authors even paying to get their work published. Almost no academic work has such a strong demand from readers that you can negotiate royalties with a publisher. If the process was driven by demand from readers rather than authors, the model would be very different (and far fewer papers would be published).

Answer 8

It's not clear that journals paying royalties would have any great benefit. The cost of those royalties would come directly from the journals' customers, who are almost exclusively universities. Royalties for academics would essentially be a pay rise. It would be much more efficient to just give us a pay rise than to implement it by our employers sending money to journals, who would then employ armies of administrators whose only job would be to send that money back where it came from, using up some of it in the process.

Answer 9

Part of the problem is that most institutions doing the research are funded completely or mostly by the government, hence your tax dollars. How would people of Virginia for example, feel if the research they funded was treated in a secretive manner and the person doing the research got rich. Of course there are many top schools which are private and they publish quite a bit too -- if they were only institutions to get royalty fees, it would create a two-tier system of research which would not be good for the user community.

Answer 10

Not a true answer, but perhaps interesting.

In Germany you can get money from online and offline publications. Even though not directly by the publisher.

There is the VG Wort (link (sorry German only)) which is an organization that distributes royalties among authors. The original idea behind it was to provide compensation for authors that do not receive royalties when copies are made. In Germany there are (small) fees on the sales of printers, scanners, photocopiers, etc.., which is then distributed by the VG Wort among the registered authors using some complex process. Even though not well known in the scientific field, you can register there with scientific articles. However I do not know what the exact prerequisites are, i.e. whether the publisher must be a German one or not. In any case English language publications are ok, though. One can also register there for instance with the PhD thesis (when published as a book with an ISBN number). Royalties will be a few 100 EUR. Not much, and not money that the publisher payed (!), but at least something.

Answer 11

When you consider how much tenured professors are paid, that you often cannot get tenured unless you have a substantial publication record, and that promotion and salary raises are often tied to publication, you will realize academics are very well paid for the work they publish: they are just not paid by the journal publishers.

Answer 12

when I was still in academics, working on my PhD, I asked exactly the same questions. Why are the universities all to happy for their staff to publish papers in journals and in turn the universities have to pay exorbitant fees to gain access to the published papers? Sure, there is prestige, some measure that puts them on a ranking system, and possibly some government grants that are based on publications. However, where it really gets bizarre is the PhD thesis. By definition, this is supposed to be an original piece of work. To ensure that work is original, one would expect that all theses are therefore published far and wide, for everyone to read and dispute. However, this is where universities become quite conflicted. They are very touchy about their ownership and copyright - after the academics already published most of this work in journals and signed away copyright to said journals. Many universities have therefore gone and published the theses in their online libraries, as opposed to the traditional approach of locking them away in their physical libraries. However, do not dare try and create a central, online repository, where as many theses as possible can be stock-piled, ranked, categorised and possibly research between academic institutions better organised and coordinated. This immediately threatens the university's role and its ability to maintain control. Once again, amusing to watch this desperate hold onto knowledge, which was already mostly handed over to commercial institutions.

Answer 13

According to you, how should the journal cover its costs?

The journal has to have a few qualified scientists on staff to select papers, propose corrections, etc. Further, it has to run servers, administer the webpage, referee disputes, etc. All of this is not free.

• If it makes the journal articles free to access, where will the money come from?
• If they keep the fees but share the profit with the author, they will make less money. Do you want them to raise the fees still further?

The journal prices do seem steep ($30+ per article for non-members), but recall that the prospective audience is small. Further, most journals do allow cross-publishing on the arXiv (for free), and/or on a university-owned webpage; it's still usually possible for researchers to make their work available outside the paywall if they care enough to do so.

I think part of what you're really asking is what do the academics get out of publishing an influential paper? Answer: career options -- they'll be more likely to get tenure, salary increases, or visiting professorships; grant applications will be more likely to be funded; they may get offers from high-paying research shops like Google; they'll be invited to speak at prestigious conferences, etc. Most of this does not directly translate into personal profit, but it's still a sufficient motivator for most academics. (Conversely, failing to publish impactful papers can lead to the opposite of these things, which can make life difficult even for the tenured).

Edit: OP has changed his mind on which question he is asking several times since the one I answered. I completely agree that journals should not be making huge profits. The question I answered was about either (a) making articles free to read, or (b) paying a royalty to authors -- I do not think either of these are sustainable - coercing publishers to make costs more reasonable is more fruitful, in my view.

Answer 14

First of all I am not defending the existing model, just another perspective:

EDIT: Handing over the authoring rights is a kind of ensurance for the journal. Fact is that it's also a hurdle to make it more difficult to republish the same paper, which in fact any intellectual owner could do, by rewriting the paper from scratch, with the same findings, but using other words. But then again: For an academic is it about just writing papers or getting your articles in renoumed journals? If it's the latter just compare yourself to poor musicians aproaching a big music label wich promises them fame, lots of tours and worldwide distribution channels.

EDIT2: Coverage and exposure are non-monetary compensations for handing over author's rights and partial distribution rights.

EDIT3: please take into account too, that academc knowledge pretty often is not absolute, but has a half-life. The nowledge of today, in some nearer future may be outdated (an example I love is psychotherapy and electroshocks, music compression algorithms or media (remember DAT or Mini-Discs?))

• First of all probably we would have to define which royalities we're talking about. There are author's rights, distribution rights and copyrights. And some universites hande it different. In my case for example, when finishing my thesis, I had to give partial distrbution rights to my university, and kept all the authoring rights. Not all universites handle it the same way.

  • Author's rights: Tipically they do and will always belong to you, but when you publish something (in a journal, university press or as a book) you agree to the reproduction by definition.
  • Distribution Rights: You offer a partial distribution right to the journal in the moment you offer your paper for publication. (one time-distribution). That is actually the same distribution right your university gets of any paper and work you produce as long as you're studying or working there. I think for that very reason academic work is normally royality free.
  • Copyrights: The rights to copy a distributed work itself, this is tipically owned by the journal in this case, and refers exlicitely of making a scan or a photocopy of the journal.
  • The Knowledge itself in the paper is not bound to any juridical law as far as I know (except the authorial rights), and that's the whole point of academic publishing: Share your knowledge, so that anybody can take up the idea, and construct on it. They will have to credit your work in the moment they use it as base for their work in the credits (that's why the academic world is so keen on mutual credits and footnotes). And by continuing your research you probably find tomorrow more important findings which are not covered in any agreement.
  • So please correct me but I do not see any logical royalities. The academic knowledge itself should be free, otherwise if you want to make earnings out of your knowledge, and find a company that is ready to pay for that, patent what you have found out, your algorithm, etc. and DO NOT PUBLISH IT. But as it is a thesis, etc. you have to publish it. Damn, that's a academic dilema ;-)

• As mentioned: Academic work, as far as I know, is free from royality payments, in the sense that most universites follow the model that: Knowledge is free. If you found something very interesting and something which can be turn into market value, most likely your university will pay you and patent that technology, but as long as you've just produced common knowledge with your thesis, nowbody will like to pay for knowledge. IMAGINE: If every paper ever produced in a university would be intellectual property and just showed with money, we would propapbly still be in the industrial age... Specially in the Information Technology sector advances have been strong because of public papers, public and shared knowledge. Don't forget univiersities are there to produce public knowledge. You're in the wrong business if you want to make money. Public/academic research is only about fame, not money, private research is about money.

• Off course you can publish your papers wherever you want, but if you go to a certain journal, you have to play by their rules. and if that rule is no royalities, so it is. It is like going to a job interview and asking more money and more holidays than they offer you initially, it will be hard to get the job.

• why it is OK for publications to profit off of someone's work? Because you as an academic are doing the same: profitting from their work as a journal (editors, it's fame, it's outreach, etc.). It is actually known as a win-win deal: You get exposure with your paper, exposure bound to all the customers this journal already has, for free, but in most cases you renounce your royalities. Off course it seems unfair if they make tons of money with all the publications, but normally, as an author, you are free to see if you can monetarize your paper without any journal. Good luck!

• The journals rose in times where there was no internet, no publications databases, no central repositories. Just some journals who had pretty much work in maintaing a certain cientific standard and additionally, or built on top of that, a stable and broad base of subscribers, ready to pay for it. The business model these days worked, because having a scientific journal was lots of work. Nowadays with the internet it's a little bit different, but not so much: When in earlier days there was too few public information available (hard to get to it) nowadays journals are a mass filter: they offer you a selection, so in any way, the old or the new one, journals are important filters, containing exclusive knowledge.

That being said, if you reduce everything to the money, you're in the wrong business. Academic life is about knowledge and partially fame, not money, that is a well known fact. If you want money go to private research, but then you're probably bound to research what your employer wants, and not by your academic thrive.

If you think what you found out in your PhD or thesis can be monetarized, you're free to patent it, but otherwise, please follow the way hundreds and thousands of academics have gone before, and share your knowledge with the world.

Closing I have found this interesting article which could shed a little bit of additional light. As I see there it depends nowadays on the journal and the contained areas, but as you can also see, it is more about the rights itself and the distribution and concentration of knowledge, than the money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_policies_of_academic_publishers

Answer 15

My question is: are they just covering their costs or are they making a substantial/hefty profit which is leading to an elite few at the top (maybe shareholders of publishing house) getting very rich?

You can check out the typical profits the publisher makes by looking at their annual reports (three of the four biggest commercial publishers in the world are publicly held - Taylor and Francis [aka. Informa], Elsevier and Wiley). Their ticker symbols are, respectively, INF, REL, and JWA.

You should see that the operating profit margin of their academic publishing divisions are about 30%-40%. Operating profit margin is usually defined as the total profit after subtracting manufacturing costs and operating expenses but not taxes. Is this high? You'll have to decide for yourself. For perspective, you can use a screener such as Finviz to check the operating margins of all the publicly-listed companies on the New York Stock Exchange. There are several hundred companies with operating margins above 40%, such as:

• Visa Inc (V, 66.20%)
• JP Morgan Chase (JPM, 65.40%)
• Facebook Inc (FB, 50.10%)
• Dunkin Brand Groups (DNKN, 44.90%)
• Phillips 66 Partners (PSXP, 42.90%)

You may recognize some of these brands.

A few more things to note:

1. Capitalism won the cold war, and capitalism is based on private companies maximizing their profit.
2. A firm is usually better off charging what the consumer is willing to pay.
3. You don't have to be part of an elite few to buy shares in Informa, Elsevier, or Wiley.