[WikiEN-l] Millions for salaries, not one cent for defense

[Andrew Gray]

On 22 July 2011 02:21, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 8:41 PM, Mark <delirium at 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.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk