When you publish something in an academic journal, the journal owns the work. The journal also sells that work and it’s how it makes its money.
Yes it is, and that’s the problem. I work my butt off to identify mechanisms to reduce musculoskeletal injury risk, and then to maintain my employment, I have to hand the rights to that work to a private organization that profits over it. To make matters worse, I then do the work to ensure the quality of other publications for the journal through the peer review process and am not compensated for it.
the journal owns the work.
Fortunately, open access has made some inroads. It is not universally true anymore. The situation is still pretty bad, though.
I know for the law journal that I used to edit the journal owned the final form of the edited and stylised work and granted the author a license to freely use it in perpetuity with attribution as to the original publication.
So the author was free to share free copies as long as it was in the original form with the journal’s name and logo on the first page, or manuscript forms as long as the original publication info was cited. My journal sold electronic and print fornats and had some licensing deals with legal research companies. But we also hosted free electronic copies for anyone that wanted to download an article
For my journal, the significant costs were paid by a foundation and the university that it was a part of. The sales were just to buy like coffee for the office and stuff help offset costs. I know especially in medicine and physical sciences there’s a lot more money involved in this stuff.
