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Dr Jeremy Fisher, DCA graduate Faculty of Humanities and Social SciencesFor more information: www.asauthors.org

DR JEREMY FISHER

In this age of million-selling books, writers make a lot of money for little effort, right? Writing is a cushy occupation and it's academics who have it tough, right?

Not quite. It is true that it's tough for academics these days. There were 896 600 students enrolled in higher education in Australia in 2002, a 36 per cent increase from1993. However, the number of academic staff has barely increased over this period. increasing the student to staff ratio 22 per cent from 1993 to 2004. No wonder a career as a care-free writer might seem an option for harassed academics.

But don't write a resignation letter yet. The median income of writers in Australia is $4800, forcing most writers to rely on other sources of income. In fact, many writers are academics. But it is also true that for most academics writing is a necessity. Unfortunately, academics frequently give their writing away, accept onerous terms in contracts and forego the right to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) or lending right payments. They regard their writing as another burden of an increasingly frenetic job. It need not be, however. If writing cannot offer an alternative career, it can offer a supplementary income.

In order to take advantage of these income streams, all writers need to be aware of the rights that transfer when they sign a publishing agreement. For an emerging scientific writer, publication in a highly cited journal is the recommended course of action. Publication in Nature (published by the Von Holtzbrinck Group, that includes Macmillan), which has an impact factor of 37 (meaning each article in it is cited at least 37 times by other researchers), represents scientific nirvana. However, most scientific journal publishers demand that writers sign over copyright and the right to electronic publication. Ownership of the published work thus passes to the publishers. Most scientific publication these days occurs in aggregated online journal databases, and authors who have signed away their rights receive no recompense for access or copying. It all goes to the publishers. For instance, Elsevier dominates the publication of science with over 1700 journals and hundreds of books published under its various imprints. Reed Elsevier, the Anglo-Dutch parent company, had a worldwide turnover of $5300 million in 2004, with a profit of over $1000 million.

Online databases are collections of publications from one or several publishers offered in a searchable form. Online databases are a far cry from the bound volumes, shelves and indexes of the past. Now, students can even access many of these databases from home. From a student's viewpoint, this is a tremendous advance. These days, a greater proportion of university libraries' budgets are expended on electronically available information than on printed information.

Australia imports much more scientific information than it produces. As a consequence, the advent of online databases means we also have to pay to access the work of our own scientists when it is made available through these databases. Australian universities each pay well in excess of US$1 million to Elsevier to obtain access to scientific online full-text databases.

Almost all online databases are created from content published overseas, though some are adding Australian content. The Informit databases put together by RMIT Publishing and licensed through Copyright Agency Ltd (CAL) carry the most Australian material. Payment for access to this material comes through CAL to both authors and publishers. In 2003 and 2004, $347 000 was paid out from these databases.

While individual writers receive only a few cents each time an article is accessed through Informit, this is better than the big fat nothing paid by other database providers. There is also the satisfaction of having concrete (and monetary) evidence that one's work is being read and used.