Quote:
Originally Posted by ekbell
For new books I have a feeling that it's a combination of motives; 'information should be free', 'publish or perish' and 'I want to be read'. For older books any profit has already been made and maybe, just maybe new readers will buy more books by that author. I'm also under the impression that academic authors do not typically earn much money from their writings due to 'publish or perish' and small markets.
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Thanks. Yeah, all of that sounds reasonable.
Academia.edu is probably the equivalent for articles as O.A.is to books (although I think that there are some articles published O.A., also). On
the website's first page, they boast, "A study published in PLOS ONE found that papers uploaded to Academia receive a 69% boost in citations over 5 years." That's an acknowledgment that "getting your name out there" is important.
"Publish or perish" is an idea that resonates a lot. I've heard that expression for a long time. If professors don't publish things, they're likely not going to move up very far or very fast. That may suit some professors fine, but most are ambitious just like most people in other professions are.
Then there's the matter of tenure. I don't quite understand the concept, but I know that professors want to get it. How much that they publish might have an effect on obtaining it.
And, again, I don't know much about it, but the C.V. (
curriculum vitae) is extremely important to ambitious academics. I know that it is, or contains, a list of all of the things that an academic-type person has published. The more that they publish the more that they can pad the C.V. when they want to move up and/or move out.
It seems that there are quite a few old books that have been made O.A., but it seems to me that most of them are newly written. I'd like to see a breakdown somewhere giving the percentages that new O.A. books have and that old O.A. books have.
I definitely agree with you when you say that you're "under the impression that academic authors do not typically earn much money from their writings." After perusing the selection in the $15 ebook sale of Palgrave's going on now, it does seem like some of those books would be of interest only to about two or three people in the world! But, I noticed that many, if not most, if not all of the books are intended as textbooks, so there are students who are pretty much forced to buy or rent them; but the amount of sales from probably most of them are still just a "drop in the bucket," because there are bound to be so few classes in the entire world on some of the subjects, because they are so abstruse. So, why
not go O.A.?