The defense -- and responding attack -- concerning publishers' "value-added" is the reason peer-reviewed journals have long been regarded with suspicion. Trade magazines do exactly the same sorts of things -- factual review, assessing viability of wording, basic claim-checking, suggesting revisions -- only with an in-house [paid] staff and still pay their writers for articles they choose to publish. If I permit a newsstand journal to alter my wording slightly -- visible to me in the galley-proofs or suggested by the editor in conversation -- the magazine does not try to pawn me off with the notion that what it has done is "value added" to my article that reduces [or replaces] the amount of payment due for the right to publish it. Academic journals have gotten by with this sort of argument with their writers for a long time, because the "pay" provided is a scholarly writing credential which may be put in the "tenure-purchase" piggybank. I do not challenge the journals' right to charge ridiculous prices for subscriptions, since producing a journal for a minuscule readership -- the specialists in any given discipline or sub-field -- entails costs that those who benefit from the journal may be expected to bear. I have always challenged their right to claim all rights to articles they publish, since that guarantees, for most articles, disappearance. Students spend days trying to find the hardcopy 1948 Spring issue of the Journal of Unquestionable Idiocies to determine if one article in it is relevant to their theses. Unless the article's author is able to assemble an anthology that includes his/her work, it might as well not exist for scholars or students in any school that was not a subscriber. The benefit of Net/Web publication -- with any needed revisions incorporated as they become suitable -- is access for interested scholars. This only becomes a question of copyright with the repressive policies now common under which institutions and/or journals demand that the author relinquish all rights. The iniquitous character of this policy is evident in the number of scholars who have been obliged to footnote themselves and pay rights fees to former universities or publishers. There was even one case a few years back where a scholarly writer was accused -- may even have been convicted, for all I know -- of plagiarizing HIMSELF, since the rights to earlier work he referenced were not his but the property of an institution for which he had worked or the original publisher. This sort of case creates an environment that actively prevents the full development of work by the original author. If one can only publish once on any subject, since subsequent work will be scrutinized and attacked for any basis in the former, who can pursue a line of development to fruition? That's why I welcome this discussion, despite firm reservations about the rights anyone but the author(s) claim to work. Perhaps it will awaken academics to a way in which they have been systematically ripped off over the years in the name of tenure credentials. It's worth mentioning, by the way, that if the colleges and universities accepted articles published in journals other than those which treat authors this way as credentials for tenure it would not only keep such journals in line but would improve the quality of the public discourse on a number of subjects. I grant that few academic areas are interesting enough to the mass readership to be published by reputable journals available to those outside academe; but there are a few, and the introduction of a little competition might do the scholarly publishing community good.
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