I offer the following without commentary.
Garret Oliver on remuneration for the contributors to the book:
Of course, there is nothing I can do about the pay. Everyone here should realize that (1) academic presses never pay much – in fact, they often don’t even pay advances, and (2) OUP is a not-for-profit organization. Much of any surplus that may be generated by book sales goes back into education, including scholarships, other books and educational material, and the subsidization of massive works such as the Oxford English Dictionary. No one is getting rich here – everyone, myself included, has made far below minimum wage, and all the OCB writers I spoke to said that they did this partially to give something back to the brewing community. The fact that so many were willing to do so says something about that community. I understand that not everyone can afford to do this work, but I’m grateful to those who did.
Report published at thebookseller.com about Oxford University Press:
Oxford University Press has described a surge in pretax profit by nearly 25% as “excellent”, but said it does not underestimate the challenges publishers are facing.
The academic publisher has reported pretax profits of £122.6m in the 12 months to 31st March 2011, up from £98.5m last year. The company also increased sales by nearly 6%, to £648.6m in that period, up from £611.9m last year.
Thanks to Evan Rail for the link.
There’s a reason many institutions and academics are beginning to embrace open-access journalism. While someone has to pay for publishing, journals get free access to both the articles themselves (actually, academics get charged to publish in them – usually several thousand per article), professors/academics are not compensated for their peer review services, then the publishing company charges your institution absolutely exorbitant fees for access to those journals. Personally, I much prefer the Public library of science model, where although the first two points still hold true, at least access to the work is then in the public domain. Academic publishing houses are horrible businesses.