On 22 July 2011 02:21, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 8:41 PM, Mark delirium@hackish.org wrote:
But I haven't seen any evidence of their leadership having that kind of vision.
Fun facts: according to their 2009 IRS filing*, their income was $53 million. $23 million went to JSTOR employee salaries/compensation. The president makes >$500,000 and the executive vice president >$320,000; I'd list the various other managers making >$200k, but there's like 10 of them.
I've just been doing the same figures, albeit focusing on 2008:
http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2011/jstor-where-does-your-money-go/
In short:
- the "joining fee" is a bit over the ongoing journal scanning costs, but not dramatically so - the annual fee then gets split 30% publishers, 70% JSTOR
JSTOR merged with another body in 2009, so the 2009 figures include some of its overhead and operations - the JSTOR-project-specific staff cost, for example, seems to be a good bit lower judging by 2007/8 data. I've used 2008 data to try and correct for this.
The one detail that really leapt out at me was how few once-off individual users there are. Total income from "pay per view articles" in 2008 was under $150k - perhaps representing seven or eight thousand articles - and dropped to half that in 2009. Given how ubiquitous JSTOR access is at academic institutions, it makes sense that it would be rarely used, but still.
** 'title transfer'? Have no idea what this is. Hopefully such a colossal sum is buying something worth buying, like copyright to entire journals and it's just a misleading label.
It didn't appear the year before, and I suspect may be something to do with the merger & corresponding transfer of assets.
*** Am I reading this Form 990 right? Are they *really* spending 3 times more on their employees than is going to the publishers, or they spend on *all* their technical initiatives, scanning and servers and all? I am reminded of the WMF budget.
My interpretation here is that the IT costs may be purely "physical" and not include the development staff - the depreciation figures seem too high to make sense otherwise. There's no staff breakdown, though.