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Yet, as you say, they are nonprofit. Are they therefore actually making any profit? I guess that they are not a public company, therefore unfortunately perhaps

Yet, as you say, they are nonprofit. Are they therefore actually making any profit? I guess that they are not a public company, therefore unfortunately perhaps we can not have any access to the revenue data to determine whether they are making any profit and how such profit is being used. In that case, most probably the safe bet is to decide that they are making profit. If, however, they are in fact not making any profit because their archiving and maintaining of these documents is paid off by the subscription charges, then this torrent does a disservice to science rather than acting as a liberator. Without that information however I do not think it is easy, or indeed possivble, to rationally decide.

cdcarter 15y ago
Non-profit does not mena that they do not make a profit, it just means that any profits are put back into the organization instead of it's leadership or shareholders.
- _delirium 15y ago
  Shareholders yes, though there's more gray area on "leadership". There's no law against using the revenue of a nonprofit organization to pay its leadership arbitrarily large salaries, unless it rises to the level where the IRS starts to see it as dirty tricks. I have no idea what JSTOR's are, though (or if that's even public). But I don't suspect they are pocketing the cash. My guess is that their reticence to open things is more of an institutional megalomania of sorts. Sort of what you often find at art museums--- while their official mission is to promote the arts and educate the public, many of their staff are at least as interested in building the prestige/fame/fortune of their institution, which explains why they would have weird policies about reproducing their public-domain artworks.
chronometric 15y ago
Check out http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2011/jstor-where-does-your-money-go/ http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2011/jstor-where-does-your... for a great analysis of JSTOR's general revenue breakdown. The top 13 officers earn over $3 million in salaries. So while they may be a nonprofit, profits do matter to some of them.

cdcarter 15y ago

Non-profit does not mena that they do not make a profit, it just means that any profits are put back into the organization instead of it's leadership or shareholders.

_delirium 15y ago
Shareholders yes, though there's more gray area on "leadership". There's no law against using the revenue of a nonprofit organization to pay its leadership arbitrarily large salaries, unless it rises to the level where the IRS starts to see it as dirty tricks. I have no idea what JSTOR's are, though (or if that's even public). But I don't suspect they are pocketing the cash. My guess is that their reticence to open things is more of an institutional megalomania of sorts. Sort of what you often find at art museums--- while their official mission is to promote the arts and educate the public, many of their staff are at least as interested in building the prestige/fame/fortune of their institution, which explains why they would have weird policies about reproducing their public-domain artworks.

chronometric 15y ago

Check out http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2011/jstor-where-does-your-money-go/ http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2011/jstor-where-does-your... for a great analysis of JSTOR's general revenue breakdown. The top 13 officers earn over $3 million in salaries. So while they may be a nonprofit, profits do matter to some of them.