Hmm, I used to work for Nature Publishing Group (now Springer Nature) and we absolutely did a bunch of work to print and get everyone their Nature subscriptions. While the actual research and review is done by others, there’s some work left in putting it in the right journals/issues, formatting it and distributing it.
Is that worth assigning the copyright for? Probably not, but the fact that publishers are paid for their role doesn’t seem too bad. It’s just the payment model is messed up. There was some movement towards open access though, where all the cost of distribution is just carried by an up-front lump sum (that can come from the researchers grant, I assume).
On top of that there’s a bunch of initiatives inside Nature at least that were funded by the income from other sources, and those are publicly available (I was working on the natureindex).
> Springer Nature Group is the single largest publisher of scholarly journals, with about 3,000 titles. In terms of revenues, however, Springer is second to Elsevier with estimated journal revenues of €1.150/$1.333 billion (30% of Springer’s reported 2017 revenues of €1.64/$1.9 billion, in fact, derive from the sale of books). Its operating profit margin of 22.8% is also well below Elsevier’s 36.8%.
That is to say, after they pay all the staff, including well-paid executives, and other expenses of putting out a journal, plus pay for other initiatives that are, as you say, funded by charging universities for access to the research created by their own employees, on top of all that there's around $300 million in profit (directly or indirectly benefiting shareholders).
(Btw, average profit margin for popular press publishing is around 12%, vs 22% for Springer or 36% for Elsevier).
To get a more accurate picture, you should be adding executive salaries to the profit figure. They don't contribute anything more than stockholders do, so amount to parasites feeding off profits.
> there’s some work left in putting it in the right journals/issues,
Who cares about issues? I can't remember the issue number for any journal article I've ever read, nor what other articles showed up in the same issue. The issue number is just a meaningless line in my bibtex file.
This was important back when journals were distributed by print. It isn't now.
My experience with academic publishers, including Springer, is that their involvement has made my work strictly worse, in direct proportion to how much they have been involved.
I work in a field ancillary to scholarly publishing, as a super-aggregator of published scholarly articles, and our systems are reliant on the concept of an "issue" as a primary key to group articles. With some of these older industries, it's reasonable to assume their systems were built to fit domain models that predate the conception of online-first publication (and the deprecation of "issues").
> Hmm, I used to work for Nature Publishing Group (now Springer Nature) and we absolutely did a bunch of work to print and get everyone their Nature subscriptions. While the actual research and review is done by others, there’s some work left in putting it in the right journals/issues, formatting it and distributing it.
More, less, or the same amount of work than the publishers of Model Train Enthusiast Monthly have to do?
Is that worth assigning the copyright for? Probably not, but the fact that publishers are paid for their role doesn’t seem too bad. It’s just the payment model is messed up. There was some movement towards open access though, where all the cost of distribution is just carried by an up-front lump sum (that can come from the researchers grant, I assume).
On top of that there’s a bunch of initiatives inside Nature at least that were funded by the income from other sources, and those are publicly available (I was working on the natureindex).