Reply to post: Re: Except a lot of hard research isn't paid for by the university.

Re: Except a lot of hard research isn't paid for by the university.

Many journals require copyright assignment. As the author or coauthor you have to agree to a statement that transfers copyright to the journal before publication. Despite, as you say, having done the work, the writing and, unlike any other such arrangement, not getting getting a penny from them for it (in open access cases often paying them).

However I'd certainly disagree with goldcd, the journal publishers themselves are not the arbiters of quality you believe them to be, that rests on unpaid peer review and academic editors. Prior to the scooping up of journals by the large publishers often they were run by the associated academic society itself (some of which morphed into giant publishers themselves). Scrape through the title of many of the big publishers and you'll certainly spot some journals which are less than persuasive in their contents. Conversely some influential papers in a few fields are still only on arxiv, not officially 'published'.