text:
Why are academics not paid royalties on published research papers in IEEE, ACM etc.?
I understand that academics are not paid a single dime on their publications. In my field (computer science), IEEE, ACM, Springer, Elsevier are some known journals/publications and none of them pay authors any royalties but they charge the readers a substantial amount of money per paper.
I'm a new PhD student so please bear with me if there is something obvious that I am missing here. I was told by my advisor that to graduate I need to publish in IEEE or ACM. He did not suggest, and I do not know of any reputed journal in my field, that either pays royalties to authors or allows free access to readers. I am forced to publish my papers at IEEE or ACM if I want to graduate and find a job afterwards.
My questions:

Why are PhD students, professors, and others who publish their life's
works in professional research publications not paid royalties on
their hard work poured into these papers?
If academics choose not to make money (e.g. they are not greedy and
want to promote free education for all) shouldn't these publications
not charge readers an absurd $30 for 6-7 page paper? Shouldn't the
publications charge a nominal fee that covers paying their employees
and distributions cost, but nothing more. Right now, it's a trillion
dollar profit industry. Why are the publications pocketing all of
the profits on research done by scientists? And why is the research
community OK with this?
If this really is an issue (Aaron Swartz -- famous hacktivist -- fought against this injustice), what can be done against
this issue by the research community and academics? For example, if
researchers at top institutions (in my field) such as MIT, Berkeley etc.
boycotted publications that do not pay researchers AND charge the
readers (thus pocketing all profits), can this issue be rectified?
Can PhD students and professors start submitting to other journals
that either pay royalties or be free to readers?

Please help a new PhD student from an underdeveloped country understand this issue. In my country, a lot of the people never go to universities or colleges (thus have no discounted university access to these papers) but are very bright and could use them.
UPDATE:
Although, I think I was clear in the original text above, from one answer here it seems I am coming off as "naive" asking journals to make papers free access AND pay royalties -- a clearly unsustainable business model. No. I am asking for either this OR that. Either pay fair royalties to authors OR make their papers free access (maybe charge readers a nominal fee to cover publishing and distribution costs). I just do not understand why it is justified for publishers to pocket billions of dollars of profit.
UPDATE 2:
Since I said in my original post above that I am a PhD student and there might be a connection I am missing due to my inexperience, I am now adding other sources (e.g. posts by senior professors) that are relevant to this discussion:

Some of my students asked me yesterday who profits from the egregious
  pricing structure of academic journals. The only answer I could give
  them was: publishers like Taylor & Francis, Elsevier, Wiley, Springer,
  et al.
As noted by The Economist, Elsevier made $1.1 billion in profit in
  2010 for a profit margin of 36%; Taylor & Francis’s profit margin was
  25%. In 2011, Elsevier and its senior executives made 31 contributions
  to members of the U.S. House of Representatives, of which 12 went to
  NY Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, who sponsored something called the
  Research Works Act (RWA), a bill that would it illegal for the
  government to make taxpayer-funded research openly accessible to the
  public.

http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2013/01/16/the-state-of-academic-publishing-rip-aaron-swartz/

Brian Nosek, a professor at the University of Virginia and director of the Center for Open Science, says, “Academic publishing is the
  perfect business model to make a lot of money. You have the producer
  and consumer as the same person: the researcher. And the researcher
  has no idea how much anything costs.” Nosek finds this whole system
  is designed to maximize the amount of profit. “I, as the researcher,
  produce the scholarship and I want it to have the biggest impact
  possible and so what I care about is the prestige of the journal and
  how many people read it. Once it is finally accepted, since it is so
  hard to get acceptances, I am so delighted that I will sign
  anything — send me a form and I will sign it. I have no idea I have
  signed over my copyright or what implications that has — nor do I
  care, because it has no impact on me. The reward is the publication.”

https://medium.com/@jasonschmitt/can-t-disrupt-this-elsevier-and-the-25-2-billion-dollar-a-year-academic-publishing-business-aa3b9618d40a

UPDATE 3:
I would like to once again stress that I realize that publishers need to cover costs and even make a bit of profit. I am not against that. I understand that businesses exist to make profit. But if certain publishing houses are making excess profit of billions while paying nothing back to the authors, how is that fair? There is no problem with the journal covering their costs. My question is: are they just covering their costs or are they making a substantial/hefty profit which is leading to an elite few at the top (maybe shareholders of publishing house) getting very rich? It seems they are making billions of dollars in profit -- after covering all distribution, publication and other costs.
Please note that I am merely looking to understand the issue better and have no preconceived notions such as "publishers are evil".

It's a business model just like any other. They provide a service (mostly storing, maintaining and copyediting papers) to academics who are already paid to do research by other means. Most academics don't care because they don't have to pay for papers out of their own pockets (libraries and governments do). It is an arguably unfair model, which is the reason why the open access model is becoming increasingly strong.

Re your update: you are not missing experience because you are a PhD student. You are missing experience because you've never worked in publishing. Unless said senior professors have worked in publishing, they are also missing experience.

I voted to close as "unclear what you are asking". The title asks why academics do get get paid royalties on their papers, the body asks other questions like "shouldn't publishers not charge that much?" Or "what can be done?". This post seems to look for discussion, and not for answers.

Does these professors not having "worked in publishing" mean they are unable to comprehend the economic model behind it from the outside? Is it fair to disregard their statements just because of it? So only people who are in the business of publishing understand it then and we should just accept things for how they are?

@Dirk I cannot ask all related questions in the title so I put only the 'royalties' question in the title. I also cannot post several other questions for each of these closely related questions I have lest they get closed as duplicate. I am NOT looking for discussions, they developed as part of answers. I am looking for specific answers.

Just because questions are related they don't have to be asked in the same question. I have a simple (personal) answer to the question in the title but no simple answers to the other questions. The fact that you can't entangle the questions indicates that the whole issue is too complex for a simple stackexchange thread.

What I am also wondering is why the institutions that pay researchers allow them to do free work for publishers by peer-reviewing articles.

Related to the issue:  http://thecostofknowledge.com/

Also a number of relevant posts here:  https://gowers.wordpress.com/category/elsevier/

Related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/52007/how-much-does-it-cost-the-publisher-to-publish-an-academic-article/52011#52011

@hermantoothrot I think that my institution pays me to do peer review (among other things). Well, it wants me to do research and publish is (and that's what I want, too). The current system uses peer review, so if I want to publish, I should do peer review to.

I find the idea of royalties for published articles  disturbing. Researchers at institutions have jobs and get paid to do research and publish it. So they already got paid for the work they published. How much money a publisher should get for their work is a totally different matter, though.

A profit margin of 36% means the publisher is adding 50% to their actual costs - to me that seems slightly unreasonable, but only slightly. Also 36% only works out to $1.1B because the company is so large; what if it was an individual journal making 36% = $50000/year? No, the unreasonable part is not the profit, it's the monopoly.

@immibis the margin means that the publisher has immense market power.

Then the margin is not the problem, the power is.

The actual root cause is the lack of unity among people. The impact of scientific work extends to all areas of society. Especially corporations. It would be good if there was a way to create a credible framework for corporations to pay royalties to authors for ideas that they take from research papers. Considering the way fake god-men and corrupt people make money and live a lavish lifestyle, it's high-time that deserving scientists earned well from their work. Not just the successful papers. All genuine work should be rewarded.

Most of the academicians in the world do poor quality work. But need to publish to get promoted. Need to publish to get funding. Need  to publish to attend conferences and make connections. And then use those connections to cite each other improving H-index - also needed for promotion. Academicians who do high quality work do not worry about royalty. They already make a lot of money by consulting with industries. Its a broken system. Why break it further by royalty incentives. Imagine the flooding of garbage papers from all corners.

The short answer is: we let publishers profit off of our work because many of us are egocentrics seeking prestige. At least it was the major reason at the creation of the modern academic publishing system. The rest of us can do little to change this, since our careers depend on it.
However, I think this could change soon since more and more academics are realising the same thing as you realised soon in your career: we do not need greedy publishers to do science and this wheel must be broken. Read about the German and French cases against Elsevier/Springer Nature [1,  2, 3, 4].
Before the existence of modern scientific journals, academics used to publish via universities' local presses. At some point, someone had a great idea: invite academics to publish in a journal where only the best would be allowed to publish and then sell it to universities. Academics accepted that because they wanted the prestige of their work being part of the hall of the best publications. Universities accepted to pay because they wanted access to high quality publications. For a more comprehensive history of academic publishing, please read 5, 6 and 7.
The system must change. Today, publishers have little monopolies over scientific knowledge. If you want a specific article you only have one seller that could sell it - that is not fair. Countries are paying a high cost to fund research and then pay again for the product of their own funding. This is just madness.
The problem of changing this goes around the metric used today to evaluate academics. If you are a researcher you need to submit to the system, publish in high impact factor journals and feed this ugly industry - otherwise you can not step up in your career. Governments are trying to change things demanding academics to submit the final version of papers into local repositories and asking to prioritise publishing in open access journals when possible.

Exactly! I understand scientists not being greedy and not wanting money, but that does not mean we want to be exploited while others profit heavily off of our work. I am really surprised how this injustice is never really discussed (at least in my experience) and quickly shut down as "you shouldn't be in academics if you want to get rich" (aka you are greedy).

@learnerX discussions around this issue have been raised in last years, as you can see in the links I posted in my answer. I think something will change soon. There are arguments in favor of creating scientific journals administrated by the European Union or by national science foundations. This would allow to restaure some balance for academic publishing.

+1 for how relevant this is to our times. I am slightly surprised that nobody has brought up sci-hub yet. A lot of businesses are grossly unfair, academic publishing today may be one of them.

Some of us are (slowly) trying to change things, but it's not easy. For instance, I am boycotting Elsevier by not publishing or reviewing for them, but some of the higher ranked journals in my area belong to them. And journal ranking (there is an official list in Finland) is used as a metric by the government to assign funds to departments. To my dismay, I recently found out that even at equal impact factor Elsevier journals are disproportionately better ranked on this list. I'm sure this is no coincidence.

@Miguel Was there an information request to find out how the list was compiled? I know it was hard, but that worked in Finland in the past.

@Miguel Yes, a number of people in my field boycott Elsevier, and have worked on starting friendly journals.  See also this wiki entry about journal reform.

many of us are egocentrics seeking prestige. Maybe. But more importantly, our career and thus our ability to make a living from research depends on our work being published in reputed journals. It's not about thousands of greedy egocentrics, it's about the incentives and restrictions imposed by the institutional structure of academic publishing. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

@The Doctor and I upvoted the answer. But the beginning is somewhat misleading.

because many of us are egocentrics seeking prestige - we need that prestige to get funding, to get the next short-term research gig, to perhaps even one day get tenure... No egocentrism involved, just a desire to survive in academia.

@TheDoctor I just realized I made essentially the same comment a few years ago. ... Sorry, but thanks for your answer.

I just realised it now too and deleted my latest comment. Sorry. Actually, I think the end of the paragraph make it clear that many of us can't do much. Not sure what should I include, but feel free to change it if you have some idea. Have a nice week.

The reason why someone can't just make an open free journal which competes away the for profit closed journals is there is a complicated "ratings" system.  Journals are rated by how many top authors publish in the journals and how many citations articles in the journal receive.  Of course the reverse is also true, an academic will be judged as a top author by what journal they publish in.  Since this is a very strong positive feedback loop, it is difficult for any of the free and open journals to become popular.  In addition, universities pay for access to these journals.  Generally, students and faculty of most universities get access to most of the top journals so most readers of academic articles aren't paying $30/paper, they're paying nothing.  It would be difficult for a university to decide to stop paying for these subscriptions because academics want to focus on their field not focus on starting a complete shift of how publishing is done.  If the university stopped subscribing to journals then all their good professors would go to universities which still provide journal access.
Basically to get rid of the system, you need a critical mass of professors/researchers to abandon the top journals all at once in favor of some other open and free journal.  It doesn't work if only a few people want to abandon the system, they basically won't be able to abandon it unless everyone does it at once.

Note that entire journals have set themselves free from racketeering publishers. It's doable: http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Journal_declarations_of_independence

It is happening in multiple fields already. It is definitely doable to move to open journals. If the top of the field especially those who already have tenure (and thus little to lose) make the move the rest will follow!

This is just how this business works. Publishers started doing important things scientists could not do pre-Internet: Organizing peer review, typesetting, making figures, printing, distribution, marketing, archiving.
Now there is no real reason to keep doing it the old way except "that is how it has always been". Anyone can self publish and get peer-reviewed from a self-organized light-weight process.
I have never followed the "chase the highest-ranking journal" game - the journal that fits the scope of the paper best, and provides good Open Access options, usually wins. (Elsevier journals need not apply). The journal and author ranking metrics like Impact Factor are seriously flawed and bordering to pointless. Yet "it is a well-known metric, so we'll use it rather than nothing" still influence even junior authors who then end up propagating the old, pointless practices.

I would very much like to do follow your approach but sadly if don't "chase the highest-ranking journal", I won't even graduate, much less find a job afterwards. My advisor only considers publication in certain top journals worthy of a PhD. This system is so deeply rooted in the minds of academia that I do not see how it can be broken other than everyone abandon it at the same time as someone else over here said.

Technically, most authors cannot ask royalties on the sales because they gave up all their rights on their own work: publishers often force authors to give away their copyright with a copyright transfer agreement. (Is it even legal? Maybe not.)
The legal defense is to at least use a SPARC author addendum or other, or better publish in open access (preferably with the pre-print in CC-BY) so that your work cannot be taken away.
The practical defense is to only publish with journals which respect the authors' rights. Aside from fully open access journals (which can work in various ways), some toll-access and hybrid publishers are better than others, but not much.

SPARC is useful information!

Is the SPARC addendum still in use? I hadn't heard about it since a few years ago before your post. Moreover, it seems to me that many journals shifted to the "click on this checkbox" format for obtaining consent, and it's difficult to add an addendum to that. (Or maybe yes --- if I change HTML page source using Firefox developer tools before accepting. Hmm, I wonder what's the legal status of that...)

@FedericoPoloni I don't have statistics about the usage of the specific addendum, but I know from some authors directly that they achieved changes in the text of contracts proposed to them.

I'm a master student and I worked part-time at my local French university library, so I know a bit about this problem without being an expert either.
Universities libraries really have no love left for Springer and Elsevier. When you are at a University, you can read the paper in the database your university bought the access to. This access cost is really high, to the point where my university decided to stop buying access to Springer a few years ago. There is also a negotiation crisis at the moment between the CNRS (the highest French research institution) and Springer. Every high ranked librarian I've spoken to hates these platforms (they call them 'parasites editors') and have wild dreams about leaving the "double pay" system.
Meanwhile, in my CS field, you have more and more open access solutions :

HAL is a French platform. Depending on your state funding, you research may have to be published there, whether or not it was published by a private editor. So you could find some Springer & Elsevier publications there (max delay : 6 months after publication). I do not know if the same system exists in other countries.
Open access conferences. Many of them are really prestigious in my field (CVPR for example). Whether or not you want to publish "ethically", you have a lot of famous conferences to choose from.

Times are changing !

It's not clear that journals paying royalties would have any great benefit. The cost of those royalties would come directly from the journals' customers, who are almost exclusively universities. Royalties for academics would essentially  be a pay rise. It would be much more efficient to just give us a pay rise than to implement it by our employers sending money to journals, who would then employ armies of administrators whose only job would be to send that money back where it came from, using up some of it in the process.

Perhaps this question will soon be closed as a duplicate ... But if not, here are my comments.
If you want to get lots of money, do not choose "academic" as a career.
Publishing your research is valuable to you if it helps you get into a better school, get a better job, get a promotion, get a raise.  For that reason, academics are happy to get their work published; they may even be happy to pay a fee to have it done!
You, as an academic, can try to choose only journals where you do not have to pay, and where readers do not have to pay.  This is easier now than in the past, but still not very easy in many fields.  If your research is supported by a research grant, you may be able to get the grant to pay for publication and free access.

I think I made it clear that even if academics are not into it for the money, I still do not understand why it is OK for publications to profit off of someone's work. Why not give the papers to readers for free or nominal cost? About being a duplicate question: I cannot find another question on here that directly asks this question.

@learnerX - there are many questions (see 'Related' on the sidebar) that touch on these points. Many papers are available for 'free', for some definition of free. But, you should perhaps ask, what would a completely free (as in no-cost) publishing model look like (much less one that returns money to a paper author)? If it looks like the current internet, that is not a good answer for academia...

It's all about brand reputation. People will pay more to watch a movie by a well known director, or to watch a football team with well known star players, or to download software from a company whose name they recognise, or to read an article in a "reputable" publication. The leading publishers like Elsevier and Wiley have built a brand reputation that you don't have if you publish on your personal web site. That reputation gives you career brownie points when you publish in those journals, and the publishers capitalise on that. Of course, they have to work to make sure their reputation is not compromised: but the way the academic system works, that is achieved largely by engaging unpaid reviewers.
Like any system where you pay a premium for using a recognised brand, you can regard it as a racket. Why should Avis be able to charge more than Joe Bloggs car rental, for exactly the same product? In the end, because people like you and me are prepared to pay more (a lot more) to go with someone we trust.
What's different about academic publishing is that the service they provide is primarily to authors rather than readers. As you have yourself indicated, academic authors strive to write and publish papers whether or not anyone is interested in reading them. Sometimes this leads to authors even paying to get their work published. Almost no academic work has such a strong demand from readers that you can negotiate royalties with a publisher. If the process was driven by demand from readers rather than authors, the model would be very different (and far fewer papers would be published).

The publishers don't provide any service to the authors. The editorial board of the journal does.

@Nemo Huh? The publishers provide all the administrative services, printing of paper copies, web servers to host electronic copies, ... Without a publisher, there would literally be no journal. Sure, it doesn't have to be Springer or Elsevier but somebody has to do it and that person or group is "the publisher".

Plus, as soon as money is involved, there's a raft of work in managing subscriptions, invoices, etc, etc. In fact, I've seen the internals of some publisher's online platforms, and managing users and subscriptions is half the complexity.

Part of the problem is that most institutions doing the research are funded completely or mostly by the government, hence your tax dollars. How would people of Virginia for example, feel if the research they funded was treated in a secretive manner and the person doing the research got rich.  Of course there are many top schools which are private and they publish quite a bit too -- if they were only institutions to get royalty fees, it would create a two-tier system of research which would not be good for the user community.

Welcome to Academia.SE! I've edited your answer a bit for clarity -- feel free to correct my edits if necessary. I would also point out that the people of Virginia apparently have no problem with journals charging $30+ to read work that was publicly funded, and that quite a bit of government-funded research is classified or otherwise unpublished.

Not a true answer, but perhaps interesting.
In Germany you can get money from online and offline publications. Even though not directly by the publisher.
There is the VG Wort (link (sorry German only)) which is an organization that distributes royalties among authors. The original idea behind it was to provide compensation for authors that do not receive royalties when copies are made. In Germany there are (small) fees on the sales of printers, scanners, photocopiers, etc.., which is then distributed by the VG Wort among the registered authors using some complex process.
Even though not well known in the scientific field, you can register there with scientific articles. However I do not know what the exact prerequisites are, i.e. whether the publisher must be a German one or not. In any case English language publications are ok, though.
One can also register there for instance with the PhD thesis (when published as a book with an ISBN number). Royalties will be a few 100 EUR. Not much, and not money that the publisher payed (!), but at least something.

You seem to have missed that the publishers mentioned in the question usually require total copyright transfer.

@Nemo: I have not missed it. First, there is no such thing as "copyright transfer" in Germany. VG Wort pays money to the authors and authorship is non-transferrable in Germany. The authors grant the publishers a right-to-use (which would be equivalent to the copyright transfer) and to my knowledge this is not prohibiting that one can receive money from the VG Wort. Then the VG Wort would not make sense at all, because almost all authors have some kind of publisher.

I have the impression that the downvoters have not really understood the answer. But perhaps I am wrong. A reason would be nice, though

Which publishers are you talking about? The academic publishers definitely make German authors sign CTA with exclusivity and whatnot, even if they might be illegal.

Or alternatively, can you mention at least one example of a researcher using this system and receiving some money for a paper's sales?

@Nemo I did. But the money doesn't come from publishers, it's paid to VG Wort by providers of copying machines, libraries, etc., and VG Wort relais the money to the authors.

when I was still in academics, working on my PhD, I asked exactly the same questions. Why are the universities all to happy for their staff to publish papers in journals and in turn the universities have to pay exorbitant fees to gain access to the published papers? Sure, there is prestige, some measure that puts them on a ranking system, and possibly some government grants that are based on publications. However, where it really gets bizarre is the PhD thesis. By definition, this is supposed to be an original piece of work. To ensure that work is original, one would expect that all theses are therefore published far and wide, for everyone to read and dispute. However, this is where universities become quite conflicted. They are very touchy about their ownership and copyright - after the academics already published most of this work in journals and signed away copyright to said journals. Many universities have therefore gone and published the theses in their online libraries, as opposed to the traditional approach of locking them away in their physical libraries. However, do not dare try and create a central, online repository, where as many theses as possible can be stock-piled, ranked, categorised and possibly research between academic institutions better organised and coordinated. This immediately threatens the university's role and its ability to maintain control. Once again, amusing to watch this desperate hold onto knowledge, which was already mostly handed over to commercial institutions.

Actually, there are several open repositories for theses. DART, the European e-theses portal, alone aggregates "766,105 open access research theses from 613 Universities in 28 European countries" as of now: http://www.dart-europe.eu/basic-search.php

I'm not sure how the central or decentralized storing of PhD theses relates to the question why journals don't pay royalties.

Cool, I have been out of the game for quite a while and did not know about DART. Will have a look. 2) I did not mean to rank PhD theses, but rather the scientific output of universities - those lists that certain organisations put out, rating the universities. 3) Well, I guess I was just trying to look at the academic system in general - what happens to research output. How universities are happy for academics to publish their work and relinquish their copyrights, whereas universities typically own the copyright of the theses? Not sure if this is the same at all universities though.

When you consider how much tenured professors are paid, that you often cannot get tenured unless you have a substantial publication record, and that promotion and salary raises are often tied to publication, you will realize academics are very well paid for the work they publish: they are just not paid by the journal publishers.

@user9646 Let me gently push back on this.  I do not know what is the NL equivalent but the Canadian province of Ontario has a disclosure law so the names and salaries of public employees earning above $100k (in Canadian currency) are published every year: see https://www.ontario.ca/page/public-sector-salary-disclosure-2017-all-sectors-and-seconded-employees You can filter the search to universities and the list of loooong.  There is no reason to suggest these are uncompetitive with or wildly more than the rest of Canada or North America.

According to you, how should the journal cover its costs?
The journal has to have a few qualified scientists on staff to select papers, propose corrections, etc. Further, it has to run servers, administer the webpage, referee disputes, etc. All of this is not free.

If it makes the journal articles free to access, where will the money come from?
If they keep the fees but share the profit with the author, they will make less money. Do you want them to raise the fees still further?

The journal prices do seem steep ($30+ per article for non-members), but recall that the prospective audience is small. Further, most journals do allow cross-publishing on the arXiv (for free), and/or on a university-owned webpage; it's still usually possible for researchers to make their work available outside the paywall if they care enough to do so.
I think part of what you're really asking is what do the academics get out of publishing an influential paper? Answer: career options -- they'll be more likely to get tenure, salary increases, or visiting professorships; grant applications will be more likely to be funded; they may get offers from high-paying research shops like Google; they'll be invited to speak at prestigious conferences, etc. Most of this does not directly translate into personal profit, but it's still a sufficient motivator for most academics. (Conversely, failing to publish impactful papers can lead to the opposite of these things, which can make life difficult even for the tenured).
Edit: OP has changed his mind on which question he is asking several times since the one I answered. I completely agree that journals should not be making huge profits. The question I answered was about either (a) making articles free to read, or (b) paying a royalty to authors -- I do not think either of these are sustainable - coercing publishers to make costs more reasonable is more fruitful, in my view.

There is no problem with the journal covering their costs. My question is: are they just covering their costs or are they making a substantial/hefty profit which is leading to an elite few at the top (maybe shareholders of publishing house) getting very rich? It seems they are making billions of dollars in profit -- after covering all distribution, publication and other costs.

I agree -- some publishers (e.g., Elsevier) make huge profits, and it's a real problem. But I think the solution is for them to charge less, not to pay royalties or charge nothing.

And I agree with you there. My point is that it is unjust to profit heavily off of scientists. If profits can be kept in a reasonable range and hence fee-per-paper can be reduced, it would be a just system and I am happy.

Elsevier makes about 5000$ per published article. Costs are of the order of 500$ per article. The difference is not all profit: some of it goes to paying executives, lobbyists, salespersons, etc, and to building a dominant position across the whole research infrastructure by buying promising platforms.

"The journal has to have a few qualified scientists on staff to select papers, propose corrections, etc. " - Reviewers are normally employed by universities or industries and not paid anything by the journal. I would hope the editor is - but the editor often has a professorship at a university as well. While one would hope that the better journals do indeed employ some academic staff, there is no clear evidence on the outside that they do. From outside it looks like they take a paper, hand it to reviewers, receive the results (responses/corrections) then re-typeset the document and publish it.

@cag51 at least in my field, Elsevier journals charge me for publishing, charge you for reading, and get editing services for free! This is not something you can justify and is why so many of us are looking towards the Open Access journals which may still charge me for publishing but at least let you read it for free!

Ask a question. So many answers and no questions. Why?

@Muze - well, when you already know everything.... /s

Yes but you still can give a brain teaser or something?

First of all I am not defending the existing model, just another perspective:
EDIT: Handing over the authoring rights is a kind of ensurance for the journal. Fact is that it's also a hurdle to make it more difficult to republish the same paper, which in fact any intellectual owner could do, by rewriting the paper from scratch, with the same findings, but using other words. But then again: For an academic is it about just writing papers or getting your articles in renoumed journals? If it's the latter just compare yourself to poor musicians aproaching a big music label wich promises them fame, lots of tours and worldwide distribution channels.
EDIT2: Coverage and exposure are non-monetary compensations for handing over author's rights and partial distribution rights.
EDIT3: please take into account too, that academc knowledge pretty often is not absolute, but has a half-life. The nowledge of today, in some nearer future may be outdated (an example I love is psychotherapy and electroshocks, music compression algorithms or media (remember DAT or Mini-Discs?))

First of all probably we would have to define which royalities we're talking about. There are author's rights, distribution rights and copyrights. And some universites hande it different. In my case for example, when finishing my thesis, I had to give partial distrbution rights to my university, and kept all the authoring rights. Not all universites handle it the same way.

Author's rights: Tipically they do and will always belong to you, but when you publish something (in a journal, university press or as a book) you agree to the reproduction by definition.
Distribution Rights: You offer a partial distribution right to the journal in the moment you offer your paper for publication. (one time-distribution). That is actually the same distribution right your university gets of any paper and work you produce as long as you're studying or working there. I think for that very reason academic work is normally royality free.
Copyrights: The rights to copy a distributed work itself, this is tipically owned by the journal in this case, and refers exlicitely of making a scan or a photocopy of the journal.
The Knowledge itself in the paper is not bound to any juridical law as far as I know (except the authorial rights), and that's the whole point of academic publishing: Share your knowledge, so that anybody can take up the idea, and construct on it. They will have to credit your work in the moment they use it as base for their work in the credits (that's why the academic world is so keen on mutual credits and footnotes). And by continuing your research you probably find tomorrow more important findings which are not covered in any agreement.
So please correct me but I do not see any logical royalities. The academic knowledge itself should be free, otherwise if you want to make earnings out of your knowledge, and find a company that is ready to pay for that, patent what you have found out, your algorithm, etc. and DO NOT PUBLISH IT. But as it is a thesis, etc. you have to publish it. Damn, that's a academic dilema ;-)

As mentioned: Academic work, as far as I know, is free from royality payments, in the sense that most universites follow the model that: Knowledge is free. If you found something very interesting and something which can be turn into market value, most likely your university will pay you and patent that technology, but as long as you've just produced common knowledge with your thesis, nowbody will like to pay for knowledge. IMAGINE: If every paper ever produced in a university would be intellectual property and just showed with money, we would propapbly still be in the industrial age... Specially in the Information Technology sector advances have been strong because of public papers, public and shared knowledge. Don't forget univiersities are there to produce public knowledge. You're in the wrong business if you want to make money. Public/academic research is only about fame, not money, private research is about money.
Off course you can publish your papers wherever you want, but if you go to a certain journal, you have to play by their rules. and if that rule is no royalities, so it is. It is like going to a job interview and asking more money and more holidays than they offer you initially, it will be hard to get the job.
why it is OK for publications to profit off of someone's work? Because you as an academic are doing the same: profitting from their work as a journal (editors, it's fame, it's outreach, etc.). It is actually known as a win-win deal: You get exposure with your paper, exposure bound to all the customers this journal already has, for free, but in most cases you renounce your royalities. Off course it seems unfair if they make tons of money with all the publications, but normally, as an author, you are free to see if you can monetarize your paper without any journal. Good luck!
The journals rose in times where there was no internet, no publications databases, no central repositories. Just some journals who had pretty much work in maintaing a certain cientific standard and additionally, or built on top of that, a stable and broad base of subscribers, ready to pay for it. The business model these days worked, because having a scientific journal was lots of work. Nowadays with the internet it's a little bit different, but not so much: When in earlier days there was too few public information available (hard to get to it) nowadays journals are a mass filter: they offer you a selection, so in any way, the old or the new one, journals are important filters, containing exclusive knowledge.

That being said, if you reduce everything to the money, you're in the wrong business.
Academic life is about knowledge and partially fame, not money, that is a well known fact. If you want money go to private research, but then you're probably bound to research what your employer wants, and not by your academic thrive.
If you think what you found out in your PhD or thesis can be monetarized, you're free to patent it, but otherwise, please follow the way hundreds and thousands of academics have gone before, and share your knowledge with the world.
Closing I have found this interesting article which could shed a little bit of additional light. As I see there it depends nowadays on the journal and the contained areas, but as you can also see, it is more about the rights itself and the distribution and concentration of knowledge, than the money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_policies_of_academic_publishers

Please read again, I am talking about intellectual property in the very first section. But you probably do not understand the difference between authorial rights, distribution rights, and the knowledge itself contained in the article.
The knowledge in an article (published by whoever, the university or a journal or on your website) is always free. If you read a journal at the university, and learn something new, you do not have to pay for it; neither do you have to pay for that knowledge if it inspires you for a  idea you then bring to market. That's the whole point of academic research.

Najib, whether research is about fame or knowledge itself, yes I agree, I have the same rose-tinted view of it, but then again: I have seen so much stinking ego at universities, so much intellectual pride and arrogance, that.. .let's put it that way: I would say a 50% arrogance while a 50% is faithful to it's initial academic purpose of teaching knowledge.

Don't say intellectual property. Your terminology is a bit confused, so it's hard to get what you're saying. For instance, where you say "authoring rights" maybe you mean moral rights or authors' rights which are a bit different from copyright.

Also going back to the monetarization, I could argue the following: If you really want to make money with your articles, then write academic books, not journals. The editorials pay royalities for those. Just as an anecdote: I had the luck myself to be approached by a editorial concerning my thesis, but then again, the bad luck, that I never got payed any cent for it, becuase I just sold 10 books ;-) the irony itself is that my research was too controlled by my professor and the approach he chose was a dead end, so my result was: this approach produces no valid results ;-)

@Nemo: Sorry for not being native english. But I know very well when to use intellectual rights as a group and when to dive down to individual rights within intellectual rights. In fact, in my first answer i break it down. So i can very well refer to intellectual property rights after having defined that.
But in fact, yes there are basically author's rights (e.g. song/songext), distribution rights (electronic and/or phisical distribution), and the coyrights (latter ones referring to a distributed work itself, e.g. copying of a book or a CD)

PD: I see people giving negative reputations for answers they don't like... please give neg rep. for those who do not answer the original question but not when you don't ideologically like the answer, that is unfair in this case.
Most answers given are not wrong, but just do not say what you like, that's different.

So please correct me but I do not see any logical royalities I don't understand how this follows just from the definitions you propose before this statement.

Please don't mix rights with royalities (payments).
An author of the paper originally has all the rights in it's origin, but: author' rights are normally given away in one form or another to the journal, the same as the distribution rights (they usually belong partially to the university and or the journal), the copyright itself belongs to the journal. So no royalities. As the opposite of an author of a academic or non academic book: In that case you normally don't give away all the rights, just the distributional rights (partial or fully).

@Canelo Digital So the explanation is that authors don't receive royalties, because they hand over their copyright. But this is begging the question. Why are they compelled to do so?

Also I hope academics are conscious, that even if they give authorial rights away, for a publication in a journal, with the very same knowledge you can rewrite the paper in other words, where all the rights belong to you.

@henning: the compelling argument is what I am pointing to: nobody forces you to hand over your rights to journals, it's your choice. But if academy life forces you to write publications you have to play by journal's rules. Is it fair? partially. it's assumed a win-win situation for both (exposure for the author, content for the journal). exposure being a non-monetary compensation for giving away the author's rights. the recording industry has similar issues, a musician is not forced to sign with a label, but label puts the conditions, knowing you'll not get the same exposure without them.

@Canelo Digital It's as much my choice as handing over my wallet to a gangster who points a gun to my head. This is also a win-win: He gets my wallet, I get my life. I think your answer would be much improved if this imbalance of bargaining power were at its center.

Moreover, your analogy to the music business breaks down precisely at the point of discussing royalties. Musicians get them, scientists don't.

well the center of the power is in discussion: Journals have it, scientists don't... it's even more, its a free choice if you publish in this journal or another one, no weapon. And concerning musicians royalities: musicians don't get anything for writing songs initially. In the academic world at least you make it for a PhD or payed by the University as research assistant. But in early music times, don't know if you remember: musicians made deals in the kind of: x money for y records, independent hoy many records the label sold. the metaphore is the power of the labels, not the money.

Don't worry too much about the downvotes. It's Academia.SE, most of the readers are academics. It's natural that academics want better circumstances for themselves (see the comment above about how academics aren't well-paid - this is the same mentality as why the top 1% of income earners don't think they're rich; I've yet to see any professor paid anywhere near the minimum wage).

Also since most academics have never worked in publishing, they have grossly inappropriate ideas about the industry. This question and others implicitly assume that lots of people want to read research papers, and they're willing to pay for it. That's not true (c.f. https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/prof-no-one-is-reading-you). It's difficult to accept that after "hard work poured into [publishing] these papers", it's read by only ten people, most of whom would not pay $30 to read it. In other words royalties would be $0. Cest la vie.

@Canelo Digital its a free choice if you publish in this journal or another one So tell me that 'other' journal that pays royalties. (I don't even believe royalties make much sense in academia, but your argument is just not convincing.)

@henning, I just said you have the choice, not the royalities. If there would be a journal paying royalities all would like to publish there and we'd be discussing because the entry hurdle is too high. I just said you had the choice to publish, and this in context with your analogy of the gun against your head. We have no gun and no robber. Just several journals and your choice whether you want to publish or not, and where you want to publish. The lack of royality payments comes from a monopoly situation of the journals and because exposure is considered a non-monetary compensation.

My question is: are they just covering their costs or are they making a substantial/hefty profit which is leading to an elite few at the top (maybe shareholders of publishing house) getting very rich?

You can check out the typical profits the publisher makes by looking at their annual reports (three of the four biggest commercial publishers in the world are publicly held - Taylor and Francis [aka. Informa], Elsevier and Wiley). Their ticker symbols are, respectively, INF, REL, and JWA.
You should see that the operating profit margin of their academic publishing divisions are about 30%-40%. Operating profit margin is usually defined as the total profit after subtracting manufacturing costs and operating expenses but not taxes. Is this high? You'll have to decide for yourself. For perspective, you can use a screener such as Finviz to check the operating margins of all the publicly-listed companies on the New York Stock Exchange. There are several hundred companies with operating margins above 40%, such as:

Visa Inc (V, 66.20%)
JP Morgan Chase (JPM, 65.40%)
Facebook Inc (FB, 50.10%)
Dunkin Brand Groups (DNKN, 44.90%)
Phillips 66 Partners (PSXP, 42.90%)

You may recognize some of these brands.
A few more things to note:

Capitalism won the cold war, and capitalism is based on private companies maximizing their profit.
A firm is usually better off charging what the consumer is willing to pay.
You don't have to be part of an elite few to buy shares in Informa, Elsevier, or Wiley.

Since you removed your answer with our elaborate discussion over this already, I am forced to ask again: why do scientists, as authors, need to buy shares at a publishing house to share profit in their own work? Second, I know I can buy shares in these companies even without being elite. But how many shares will I buy? Bulk of the profit will go to the "elite few" who were there from the start and bought shares early and so hold maximum shares now.

@learnerX if you want to ask why scientists need to buy shares in the publishing house to share in the profit, ask it in the question itself (or even better, ask it in another question). For the last part, I would not use "elite few" - that term carries negative connotations which don't apply here. If you buy shares in company X and its earnings explode over the next decade, you're not "elite", you're just clever enough to identify X was a good company early.

I wasn't aware "elite few" has a negative connotation (non-native English speaker). But still, this whole "write papers, go through the arduous process of publishing them, and then buy shares if you want any proceeds from sales" is beyond nonsensical to me. Besides this post is not motivated by money, but by what is fair. My original question, as it still stands, was to other academics here: in such a case, why don't we publish in other open access journals and boycott the ones that refuse to share profit?

@learnerX put it in the OP or ask a new question.

Publishers make huge profits by exploiting the perverse structure of the academic publishing market, and the lack of direct competition with one another. (You cannot replace a Nature article with a Science article.) Generalities about capitalism are not helpful for understanding this.

@SylvainRibault "lack of direct competition with one another" The CEO of my last academic publisher repeated many times in meetings how competitive academic publishing has become. Authors today can pick from tens to hundreds of journals for their next paper. It's why publishers resort to spam to get submissions. The barrier of entry to starting up a new publisher is pretty low (hence there are so many predatory OA publishers). Sorry, but I don't think you've worked in publishing before.

Authors choose, but readers do not, and in the subscription model it is readers who pay.

@SylvainRibault readers choose what to read. If they don't find the content you publish interesting they won't subscribe. I don't understand how you can come to that conclusion.

A researcher who looks for a reference does not choose what to read. And big deals with academic publishers give subscribers little choice in what they buy.

@SylvainRibault a researcher who looks for a reference indicates the original paper was interesting, which means the journals would have competed to publish it. I don't see where the lack of direct competition comes from. Big deals are never compulsory, and subscribers are free to subscribe only to individual items a la carte. If you know of any journal which can only be subscribed to as part of a bundle - please name it.

@Allure I agree with Sylvain. Publishers own little monopolies. You can't obtain the same article from different sources. This is one of the models discussed recently to turn academic publishing more fair, more than one seller for the same article. Moreover, publishers usually 'force' universities to buy bundles with several uninteresting journals raising up the price of individual journals.

@The Doctor - if you call that a monopoly, then there are lots of monopolies in the world. You can't get a Big Mac from KFC. You can't get an iPhone from Blackberry. Et cetera. I've also addressed bundling in my previous comment.

Yes, what you are describing is capitalism. But it's certainly not free market economy.

On the last line, see also https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/business/economy/stocks-economy.html

@Nemo I don't see the relevance? The fact that most people don't own stocks doesn't mean that any individual person cannot buy - it's just a matter of registering with a broker and putting in some money.


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Why can't motivations in a paper's introduction be copied?
I'm always baffled that the preamble in introductions in scientific papers is pretty much always the same for papers dealing with the same topic. And yet, no two papers have the same introduction, since doing so would be plagiarism. Even worse, one cannot even copy this preamble from papers one has already written, as paper reviews are anonymous, so reviewers cannot know whether the author is plagiarizing or copying his/her own work.
At the same time, this feels like a huge waste of time, akin to writing essays in high school, where you have to paraphrase and write X number of words just to fill in the page.
Talking with other academics, this is pretty much a pain point for everyone, which not only annoys the writers, but also the readers, who must skip useless text every time they begin a new paper.
I guess a simple reference to a specific introduction is not enough, as a paper needs to stand to its own (if it even makes sense in this context), but why is it so ingrained that such text must be written and rewritten, ad infinitum, in a Sisyphean effort?
EDIT: Please note that I'm talking about just the preamble of the introduction. It makes sense that overall the introduction needs to be tailored on your specific contribution. But often papers start with a brief description of the field/topic it contributes to, the field's practical applicability, and possibly some related work that makes the field look good. The preamble is just the hook needed to place one's own contribution in an overall context (also to explain the topic to somebody who may have stumbled upon the paper), but at the same time there is no real requirement that it be rewritten new every time. So why?
As an example, consider, as posted in a comment, this preamble:
Hedgehog hunting is an important problem in ecology. While the typical procedure consists of a) tracking, b) sniffing, c) aiming, d) shooting, e) desugaring, f) acquisition, the role of the spikes in sniffing did not come into the spotlight before the seminal work of Whippet et al. (2007). In this work we propose a radically different approach to hedgehog spike treatment by invoking desugaring before sniffling.
But if I wanted to write about using metal spikes, you see that the first sentence wouldn't really need to change. And such preambles can usually take a whole paragraph or two, which makes the rewriting annoyance pretty big.

If an introduction is really as interchangeable as you suggest, it is best to omit it altogether, as it adds nothing to the paper.

Even if reviews are anonymous, reviewers can tell if text is plagiarized, because they read other papers.

@henning It's mostly for the beginning, something like "The field this paper is about is important and has many practical application like yadda yadda". This makes sense to start a paper, it makes no sense to write it differently every time. In my field at least nearly every paper begins like that.

See here and here.

@MichaelGreinecker I'd like to point out that most answers there never specifically say the why, just "don't do it" or "it's bad". The ones that do (like 'you can still improve it') are definitely not convincing.

@henning I disagree. A paper without an introduction would seem incomplete, and it would be tedious if the reader had to look up a second paper to see the introduction. As long as the intro isn’t long, I see no issue with having repeat material in order to have your paper be completely self-contained.

@Svalorzen: I do not see how there can be an answer to this question that doesn’t also answer yours, and vice versa, which would make it a duplicate. If you feel there is a difference, please edit your question to focus on it. If you are unhappy with the existing answers, consider offering a bounty.

@Wrzlprmft I think maybe the "why did this become the ingrained way of doing things" bit might have a distinct answer.  Not to say there isn't overlap, but the basic answer to that particular question being "because half-assing your introduction makes us question what else you were half-assing, and that's just a plain bad idea".

Would you not want to tailor the description of the overall broad picture to focus more on the current problem you are solving? "Hedgehog hunting is an important problem in ecology. While the typical procedure consists of a) tracking, b) sniffing, c) aiming, d) shooting, e) desugaring, f) acquisition, the role of the spikes in sniffing did not come into the spotlight before the seminal work of Whippet et al. (2007). In this work we propose a radically different approach to hedgehog spike treatment by invoking desugaring before sniffling."

You may want want to try jumping straight into the problem or aim if you believe your research community will not doubt the importance/significance of your research.   I've seen such format in mathematics where well-known problems do not have much of an introduction.  Authors start with the problem so as to remind readers and introduce notation.

At a fundamental level, every new paper is (or should be) presenting something new, whether it be new results, methods, experiments or even summaries or reviews. The paper would be redundant if it didn't present something new.
The 'introduction' or 'motivation' section follows the title and abstract as the next link in the chain to motivate people to read your paper in its entirety. Since it's your paper that you want to motivate people to read, it doesn't make sense to copy the words intended to motivate people to read some other paper.
There may be parts that overlap with prior work (and other answers on the site suggest methods to deal with that), but if you want your motivation section to relate to the novel elements of your paper, it needs to be recast for each new paper.
Your question (especially per your update) is why this boilerplate text can't be either copied or left out altogether.
When I'm presented with a paper, I am not always motivated to read it at first, so it doesn't help for the author to jump straight to the equations or experimental results, etc. What does help is to start with common ground. This is the job of the preamble. You can't leave it out altogether for the same reason libraries include the first part of each book's Dewey Decimal Number on every book - it's needed when the work is separated from the collection.
As for copying, it's a matter of skill in the craft to keep it concise, yet useful:

No one prevents you from copying a few sentences from your previous papers. Except that perhaps page/word limits will encourage you to jump as quickly as possible to your actual contribution. – Alexey B

"Since it's your paper that you want to motivate people to read, it doesn't make sense to copy the words intended to motivate people to read some other paper." - I think this assumption is wrong. We may not be talking about the entire introduction section, but the first one or two paragraphs (the ones that introduce and motivate the authors' specific subfield to researchers from other edges of the general field of the expected target audience) do often boil down to the same content across papers.

@O.R.Mapper This is indeed correct, I'm talking about the preamble. I'm updating my question now.

@Svalorzen No one prevents you from copying a few sentences from your previous papers. Except that perhaps page/word limits will encourage you to jump as quickly as possible to your actual contribution.

@O.R.Mapper The original question was about why motivations can't be copied. The issue of handling overlap - particularly substantial overlap - is addressed elsewhere (cf third paragraph above). If the overlap isn't substantial, it isn't an issue.

@Svalorzen I've updated my answer in response to the comments and the addition to your question.

@AlexeyB. Spot on! I've included that (copied textually! :) ) in my answer. +1

I think copying a few sentences or a paragraph from your own work constitutes self-plagiarism, which is discouraged/prohibited, depending on the field/journal. So it shouldn't matter whether the review is single- or double-blind.
Now, take a moment to consider the positives in this. The OP mentions inconvenience to the writer, which is often valid. However, writing the preamble in a different way, adding a new update or turn of phrase can make the paper more engaging for readers and increase recall value. If there already exist a lot of similar papers in the field, this helps your work to stand out, and additionally, can hook new readers from related-but-not-identical fields. I think the preamble adds to the character of the paper, so in best case, it is time/effort well invested. In the worst case, well, there is no choice, so lemonade from lemons.

Of course if somebody feels like writing a fancy preamble they shouldn't be stopped. However this hardly feels like a compelling argument to force everyone to rewrite it pointlessly. In fact, since by definition most people are not incredibly good writers, the result of such senseless rewriting often result in poorer papers, rather than the opposite. So once again, I don't see the why.

@Svalorzen- I wouldn't call it pointless/senseless if there is a chance that it increases readership/recall value. Certainly, it can be a pain, but since writing is our primary mode of communicating research, I guess it is a skill worth honing (Note: I'm not a native English speaker, nor do I consider myself a good writer, so I certainly share the annoyance)

There is also a chance that it decreases it rather than using an already well written one. The thing is, nothing in this explains why most people expect the preamble to be rewritten, rather than it being just an option.

From the journal office POV, I suppose it makes automated plagiarism checks easy. That aside, somebody did put in considerable effort into making a good preamble, so reproducing it verbatim would be some sort of IP infringement. In case you are the original author, it still is infringement because on submission you'd typically sign a copyright form transferring rights to reuse any material from there.

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How often do good journals publish amusing little corollaries?
I've had a little corollary sitting around a while now. It is closely related to a major theorem in my area.  Its statement is easy to understand (and rather interesting/amusing on the surface of it) and it's proof can be written in a couple of paragraphs.
I thought it had potential to be the beginnings of a nice paper, but I've struggled to find good "related stuff" to add to it.
Should I just submit this little 1.5 page paper, or would I be wasting everyone's time?  Do any good journals regularly accept these kinds of "notes"?

No idea. Why don't you ask them what they find interesting?

It is hard to know what you mean by "amusing" without seeing the paper.  If you mean it literally -- i.e., the main purpose of the result is to entertain the reader -- then a strong research journal will probably not want to publish the result, as they are not in the entertainment business.  A journal that publishes many short amusing pieces is The American Mathematical Monthly -- which is not to be scoffed at, as it has one of the highest readerships of any mathematical journal. However, this journal is for papers that are readable by a quite broad mathematical audience (although, to be fair, the breadth of the target audience varies quite a bit from article to article).  If it is closely related to a major recent theorem in your subfield, it may be too specialized for the Monthly.
But let me take a step back and address the question of publishing a very short paper.  It is my understanding that many journals are quite happy to do this.  I don't know any journal that would reject out of hand a very short paper (with obvious exceptions like Transactions of the AMS, which is the AMS publication for papers too long for the Proceedings of the AMS), but there are some strong journals that specialize in short papers -- e.g. Mathematics Research Letters -- or very short papers: Comptes Rendus has a six page limit.
My impression (though I am not a journal editor) is that editors like short papers just fine.  On the other hand, it is demonstrably true that the average length of math papers has increased over the years, though there is also variation from subfield to subfield (my impression is that e.g. in some parts of combinatorics it is common to write many short papers).  I just looked back at my own work, and I have one three page note (published in the Monthly) and everything else is at least six pages.  This despite the fact that I often started with a manuscript that was four pages or less.  I think it is as you say: if you have something, it is natural to build on it.  In most branches of mathematics it would look much more reasonable to publish one 30 page paper on a subject than a length ten sequence of three page papers on the subject.  So if you end up with a three page paper, then it is likely that it does something quite remarkable or it cannot be evidently expanded into something more.
(Or maybe not.  I am currently editing a paper written with my PhD student.  At the moment it looks like the final product will be about three pages.  In this case the result that we get is more than amusing and less than remarkable, but pushing it further is meant to be part of my student's thesis work rather than a collaboration between us.)
Anyway, one of the benefits of a short paper is that...well, it's short.  So I would say that you don't have to figure it all out in advance.  How long should a referee spend on a 1.5 page paper with a statement that's easy to understand and a two paragraph proof?  Adding four more months, you can be reasonably confident of receiving a report in roughly four months, shorter if you're fortunate (and, sadly, longer if you're unfortunate).  So submit it somewhere and see what happens.  You may as well try a very good journal first -- really good math journals have made a point of getting "preliminary reports" and (often) quickly bouncing back papers that are not up to snuff.

If other people share your enthusiasm for the observation and the proof, then it's of interest to journals. I would just contact one of the editors and see what they suggest. It's their job to be in charge of these questions.

It can't hurt to write it up. Even if your first journal of choice doesn't accept it (due to their editorial policies) some other journal will (if it is indeed as interesting as you think it is). Also, some journals publish brief "notes" in addition to full-fledged articles. Look at recent issues of specific journals in your field to see if they have something along those lines. Do they contain brief papers which feature proofs of interesting but not ground-breaking results? If so -- send your paper there. If not -- send it somewhere else.

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What to do when my introductory sentence is taken from another author's paper?
I am about ready to sumbit a paper in mathematics, but I have one worry.  While researching, I came across a sentence in the introduction of an old paper that I really want to use (with a very minor modification) in my abstract.  It has been in all of my drafts for a long while now, and I can't see getting rid of it!!!
Is this a serious issue?  Even though I'm stealing the sentence, I am not actually stealing any mathematics, so it kind of seems (??) okay to me. The old paper is cited elsewhere in my paper, by the way.  I just don't know how I can give credit for a phrase when it appears in the abstract... it would seem overkill to put the whole citation in the abstract.
In times like these I wish I hadn't ditched all my English major friends.
EDIT: THANKS for all of the replies. You convinced me to change to wording, and I believe I ended up with something almost as good.  I am a nervous wreck as it is, so I definitely don't need this plagiarism thing weighing on my conscience!!

Unless the sentence you mean is a common phrase like, "Let G be a group" or is so famous that does not require citation, it seems to me you do not know what plagiarism is.  See here and here.

I well remember the first (and only) time I asked Cassandra W. out.  She replied, "Absolutely, positively, no!"  That cannot be said in any better, clearer way, and it applies equally here.  So, with due credit to Cissy, absolutely, positively, no!  You cannot use the words of others without proper credit.

How about use it as a quotation with a proper reference to the original work?

"It was the best of papers... it was the worst of papers..."

"It was a dark and stormy night.  Suddenly, a free abelian group rang out!"

You've illustrated a perfect example how "plagiar-phobia" is being taken to ridiculous extremes. Don't get me wrong. You have a right to be concerned, but not because of anything you intended to do, but because the "plagiarism police" are borderline insane nowadays and are looking to crucify anyone who commits the ever-so-slightest aberration. Yet many of these same people would want to give murderers and rapists "a second chance". Remember. According to the plagiarism police, no two people could or should EVER have the same fleeting thought.

@Inquisitive Further, you need to compare against every single paper (at least in any related field) to ensure that no two sentences use the same words.

"To paraphrase Prof. John Doe[1], ."

I think some of the early advice on this question was really bad. It's easy to give casual attribution for a quote if you do it like this:

Abstract : This paper is devoted to the study of K-algebras. It has
  long been known that 'All regular K-algebras are equivalent, but every
  irregular K-algebra is irregular in its own way.' (Tolstoy). We
  classify a new family of irregular K-algebras. This result has
  implications in algebra theory.

Then you can cite the paper properly in the body of your paper. Writing the abstract like this makes it very clear who the quote came from and you can deal with the where later.

very interesting.  I'm not sure that I could do that with my sentence, but it is a good idea for the future.

Aside rules about format, i think it is a very practical and useful answer. There is no shame in using a good quotation, and we often forget that.

To clarify, this isn't literally quoting Tolstoy who probably wasn't an expert on any kind of algebra. However, Tolstoy did write "
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." (Anna Karenina, opening sentence).

This is not a quote or an excerpt, it's a paraphrase. Make the parenthetical remark "(paraphasing Tolstoy)" or "(to paraphrase Tolstoy)".  It appears that @ForeverMozart actually wants to paraphrase rather than quote. If the modification isn't witty like this one, but merely informative, you can say "(borrowing from Tolstoy)".

A well-known paper by A.R.D. Mathias starts (emphasis mine): "This paper is concerned with combinatorial properties of families of infinite subsets of ω, the set of natural numbers 0, 1, 2, .... Before introducing the notion of a happy family, for the suggestion of which phrase the author is indebted to Professor J.N. Crossley, we state the notational conventions that will be followed throughout the paper and review some familiar concepts." A.R.D. Mathias, "Happy Families", Annals of Mathematical Logic 12(1977), 59-111. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0003484377900067

@MitchellSpector Notice that the OP wants to use the sentence in the abstract, where typically there is less room for such a specification.

@MassimoOrtolano Yes, I was just amused (perhaps too easily?) that the particular Tolstoy example that was mentioned had actually been used in a paper I was familiar with.

@Significance, sorry, I didn't see that you already gave the same advice in your answer. I was just looking at the top two answers at the time, which were highly-upvoted, extremely verbose, and seemed to be advising the OP not to use the sentence.

A good rule is: Do not paste verbatim text from another manuscript into your manuscript, unless it is a clearly indicated quote
You may think that at some point you'll edit the text enough that it will be sufficiently unique. Or you may see it as a place holder that you can use to guide your writing. However, this is very dangerous from a plagiarism perspective. Time goes by and you can forget what was your text, what was taken verbatim from elsewhere, and you can be left uncertain as to whether you have changed it.
Furthermore, even when you are taking personal notes in a working file. Put quotes around anything you take from another source. You do not want to risk contaminating your manuscript with text where it is unclear whether it is your words or the words of another.
However, now that you have a sentence that pretty much comes from another source, unless one of a few exceptions apply, you should remove it and replace it with another phrasing. A few exceptions would be (a) it is a canonical phrase, (b) you've altered enough words and it's generally a fairly standard sentence. Citations and references allow you to more closely paraphrase the words of the original authors; of course, if it is a quote, then use quotation marks.

Editing someone else's thoughts is still plagiarism if not acknowledged.  IF you copy the words, use quote marks.  Copy the thoughts, don't use quotes, but either way acknowledge who helped you.

No, do not "excerpt" an excellent sentence. Apparently your point is that that particular verbalization of an idea was sufficiently exceptional that you could see no better expression. And, yes, this is a reasonable conclusion, since it is entirely possible that things are very-highly-optimized. But all the worse, you ought not neglect to credit someone who has achieved that tight, nearly-ultimate, optimization. The "art" of critical expression is not officially recognized, yet it is implicitly recognized in almost all things people do.
That is, think about real-politick...

yes, the statement seems highly optimized and concise (perfect for an abstract). Two or three sentences are required to replace it...

Most journals do not allow you to include references in the abstract, but you should not steal the sentence without attribution. Some options:

Remove the sentence from the abstract and include it in the Introduction, with appropriate attribution and referencing.
Put the quote in both the abstract and the Introduction. In the abstract, try the following format: '"This is a beautiful quote about mathematics," accoring to Joe Brown.' In the Introduction, repeat the quote with the full reference.
Put it into your own words in the abstract and include the quote, properly referenced in the Introduction.
Take it out.

could I put an asterisk next to the paper in the References section, like

abstract wording

That would not be enough by itself, no.

"An authority for the answer — properly attributed": (H. Todd, 1910)
"Everything’s Already Been Said." (S. Guise, 2011) "It is very challenging to write completely original content" (ibid) "but nobody will notice this when reading" (D. Rousseau, 2005) "and great minds think alike anyway" (R. Caner, 2012) "so you might as well just use it", (P. Smith, 2012) as "nobody will care anyway" (J. Solano, 2014) "especially if it is not important to them" (S. Mitchell, 2011)
"I hope that helps" (F. Jensen, 2016)

There are so many opinions out there that you have to be careful! I say that when in doubt go to the source. I suggest you buy the AP or MLA Manual or go to Purdue Owl/online writing lab.  There you will find the writing styles and a whole section on 'avoiding plagiarism.' Go to the source, my friend!! Good luck!

There you will find the writing styles and a whole section on 'avoiding plagiarism.' — Coincidentally, one may find a lot of questions concerning best practices for "avoiding plagiarism" on this very site, as well.


text:
When a conference has an abstracts and a later papers submission date, is okay to skip the abstract submission and just submit the paper?
I want to submit a paper for an ACM conference and I see that there are two dates like this:
Full Papers
Abstracts due: May 10, 2013
Papers due: May 17, 2013
The issue is that I am still working in tabulating the results from my experiments and I do not think that I will reach the deadline of May the 10th. Can I skip the presentation of the Abstract and submit the full paper on the other date? or should I prepare the abstract and only submit that in the first date?
Any advice will be great, thanks.

I don't know about ACM conferences, but in my field, if a conference publishes full text papers, abstracts are submitted first and selections made for presentations. Full-text papers are then invited for accepted abstracts, and subjected to full review. If you haven't had an abstract accepted, you aren't invited to submit a paper.

No.
It's a deadline.  Follow it.
Program committees ask for abstracts early to streamline the reviewing process.  Asking them to make a special exception for you because you're not ready yet is unfair to the program committee, who would have to do extra work (however small) to accommodate your late submission, and to the hundreds of authors who got their abstracts in on time.

The issue is that I am still working in tabulating the results from my experiments

The tabulated results of your experiments are not going to appear in your abstract anyway; only the conclusions from your experiments will.  If you don't know yet what those conclusions will be, you're not ready to submit.  So don't.  There's always another conference.
But! Remember that you are allowed to revise your abstract in the week before the paper submission deadline.  It is perfectly acceptable to submit a tentative abstract, which describes your results in enough detail to assign reviewers, and then include a more detailed/updated abstract in your paper submission.  If your conference is using EasyChair or HotCRP, you can change your abstract in the electronic submission form, and the committee will no longer see the old abstract.
If you make significant changes to your abstract in the paper submission, you risk angering the program committee members who were assigned your paper, who could (legitimately) reject your paper without review.  So don't do that.

The relevant PhD comic: http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1899 (although it's about 7 months, not 7 days).

It's very simple: just ask the contact person. Don't assume.
Email the contact person listed on the conference website (e.g. the PC chair), and proceed according to their reply:

If they answer "yes", you can skip the abstract.
If they answer "no", you can't skip the abstract.
If they don't answer and there are only a couple of days or so left until the abstract deadline, you can't skip the abstract.

Note: The reason for abstract submission deadlines is usually to allow the PC to effectively distribute the refereeing workload amongst themselves. For this reason, changes to the abstract after the abstract deadline are typically allowed (that is, unless you switch it to a completely different kind of paper). Again, though, that's also something you need to confirm in advance.


text:
What are positive and negative outcomes of requiring Ph.D. students to take a pedagogy course?
My mathematics department (where I am employed as faculty) is considering requiring its Ph.D. students to take a two-semester course in pedagogy and educational theory. All of them also TA lower level math classes, so the proposal has some merit. I am trying to decide whether to support or oppose this proposal (or suggest modifications to it).
Although I am skeptical, I want to be open-minded. In departments that have adopted such requirements, what have been the positive and negative outcomes? Have students enjoyed such courses, and/or felt that they were useful? And has the quality of TA education been improved?

My 2 cents: As a student of a large research institution I am taught by a number of different PhDs. Unfortunately, many of these professors are much better researchers than they are educators. The university hires them for their research and the money they bring in, but they still have to teach some courses.
By requiring pedagogy courses of PhD students, not only will your TAs improve, but they will also be able to effectively teach higher level courses if they do end up employed by an educational institution.

I was required to take a semester of a general pedagogy, and a semester of math teaching pedagogy class, as part of my undergrad math degree. Although I did not appreciate them at the time, I highly value the exposure to that knowledge now. It helped me as a TA, presenter, and for my outreach work.

I agree with @Ramrod, though the two-semester requirement may be a bit much. One semester on effective teaching techniques, without getting too much into theory, would have been amazing for the math department I served. A second semester might have caused a student revolt, though.

I've always found it odd that this isn't more widespread.  It would certainly improve grad teaching, which is often bad, and the time investment wouldn't be that big (though maybe one semester would do it).  Presumably it would also help grads be competitive for teaching-oriented jobs on the other end, which could be a big plus depending on the dept's typical placements.  Anyway, I look forward to reading about potential downsides!

@Mark I think there is very little downside if said courses are well-done. However, this has generally not been my experience with pretty much all pedagogy-related courses offered in my old university. For those, "waste of time" would be putting it mildly.

You might also want to consider the effect that this will have on your students when they go to look for jobs- many hiring committees would consider this to be a positive aspect of an application.

If the course is aimed at mathematics students it will probably be helpful. If it is a general course, then it will probably be nothing more than a waste of time.

My school makes these optional but if the students take them, they get to put it on their transcript and CV. As a result, almost all students take them. We're a R1 university and they have minimal TA requirements, so they need all the "evidence of effective teaching" credits they can get.

The main negative outcomes would probably be the opportunity cost - what else the PhD students could have been spending their time on - and the risk of developing a bias against such courses and the material contained therein if they are poorly designed or executed.
On the other hand, without critical reflection and exposure to alternatives, we tend to teach in the way we were taught, which may or may not be the most effective approach. Moreover, we may be unaware of common misconceptions and difficulties with our material, having either overcome these hurdles long ago or having sidestepped them. A good course can help with this, especially if it has a subject-specific component as opposed to being completely general.
Since you refer to a mathematics department, you might be specifically interested in Alcock & Simpson's Ideas from Mathematics Education: An Introduction for Mathematicians.


text:
How to do a good job of undergraduate advisement?
Among my other duties as a tenure-track assistant professor (in math), I serve as an advisor to undergraduates: they are required to meet with me and get my approval on their choice of courses before they can register.
I dread this job every semester, because I suspect that I do a poor job of it. Some of the reasons:

I have little sense of what career opportunities are available to students of moderate ability and motivation. I can probably help the very top students, because I enjoy reading and listening to first-hand accounts told by extremely successful people, but I have little sense of what is available in the "middle of the market".
It does not help that this city is relatively economically depressed, and that I have learned the hard way not to ask people here "What do you do?" This seems to run counter to local etiquette, and when I do ask, people often describe work which sounds dull to me, and about which they don't seem very excited either.
There are a plethora of campus-wide programs, and periodically I get e-mails asking me to push various of these to my advisees. However, I don't really know anything about these beyond what I read in the e-mails, and in particular I don't have (and can't readily acquire) any first-hand knowledge of which are actually valuable and which are just empty organizationalism and/or some administrator trying to make him- or herself look good.
Students rely on me for information on what their graduation requirements are, but this is subject to rapid change and to misinformation which I can still find on the internet (despite me pointing it out to those responsible). I am constantly terrified of giving students bad advice which will delay their graduation.
In general, I am somewhat spooked by discussions with my colleagues who have invested a lot of time and energy in learning how the university outside my department works. I get the sense that there are a bunch of administrators pushing their pet projects, and colleagues who are involved with these seem a bit shell-shocked to me.

Despite all of this, I have the opportunity to help students, and I want to do a good job of it. What are some principles to keep in mind?

In addition to my answer below, I'd comment that the obvious answer to many of the specific issues you've raised is to ask more questions of people around you.  For example, if the description of a new campus-wide program is vague, then ask for details.

I've had some experience in running a training program for faculty advisors and working with new advsiors at my institution in the US (you haven't said so, but I'm guessing that you're at a US institution.) I've been asked a lot of very similar questions in recent years.  Your questions show that you care about doing a good job!
Your questions also seem to show that your university isn't providing enough support to faculty advisors.  I'd argue that having incorrect information on the web site and pushing new programs for undergraduates without providing relevant information to the advisors are signs of disfunction in the advising system at the university level.  You may be able to work around these issues, but a better long term solution is to encourage the administration to fix the system.
At a very low level, you can address systematic problems like this by being persistent but polite in reporting issues to the responsible authorities.  For example, emailing the registrar's office to tell them that information on one of their web pages is contradicted by the current catalog should probably result in the incorrect web page being updated.  Don't complain about these things in a very public way though.  Some administrators welcome this kind of assistance while others dislike "interference" and might ignore you.  If you run into that attitude, then your best approach may be to escalate to that person's boss.
At a higher level, issues like these can be addressed through faculty committees.  If you have a faculty committee that deals with advising issues (or more generally with academic procedures) then you can bring these issues to the attention of the committee.  Don't be surprised if you're recruited to work on the committee!
Here are some suggestions of things that you can do on your own to be a better advisor:

Learn as much as you can about the academic rules and keep up with changes.  In working with students, either be absolutely certain of the answer to a question or know who to ask to get an authoritative answer to that question.  The worst mistake that you can make is giving incorrect information to a student.  In comparison, "I'm not sure of the answer to this question" is much better.
Make sure that you have correct information about any student that you're advising.  Know how to use your Student Information System to look up a student's transcript, run a degree audit, etc. Many advising mistakes are the result of advisors not having complete and correct information about their advisees.
If a student is in danger of "flunking out" due to bad grades, it is important to intervene as early as possible.  If the problems are academic rather than personal than you should work with the student to come up with a realistic plan to address the student's bad grades.  Make sure that you know all of the rules about academic probation/suspension and that you're aware of the options that a student might have for withdrawing from classes.  Monitor your advisees' performance by checking their midterm and final grades each semester.  If your campus has an early alert system then respond to flags raised on your advisees.
Crisis management is important.  When a student who has been doing well suddenly starts doing poorly, this can very rapidly result in loss of financial aid, academic suspension, etc.  Often times these situations are the result of personal problems (health problems, psychiatric illness, drug abuse, death in the family, breakup with a boyfriend/girlfriend, etc.)  These kinds of personal problems are not things that you should address, but you should refer the student to offices that can help (a campus health center, counseling office, etc.)  In these situations it is often best for the student to cut back on their academic commitments by dropping courses or even withdrawing from an entire semester.
Academic decisions can affect financial aid, and the rules are so complicated that faculty advisors generally aren't in a good position to answer questions about them.  Check with your financial aid office on the consequences of any action that a student takes that changes their number of registered credit hours.
Advising students should ideally be more than just course selection.  The traditional "prescriptive advising" approach of simply telling students what courses to take should be replaced by a "developmental advising" approach in which the advisor's job is to help the student understand the choices available to them, clarify their goals, and then take responsibility for their educational path.  This kind of advising can be more rewarding for both students and advisors but it takes a lot of work.  Developmental advising can be particularly helpful for those students "of moderate ability and motivation" by helping them to figure out what they want to do in life and having that serve as motivation to do the hard work necessary to be more successful students.
The reality is that a BS/BA in mathematics is not by itself a qualification that is likely to lead to an exciting career in mathematics.  Most students are going to need to combine this with either a second major or a more advanced degree.  For example, there are lots of opportunities for students with MS degrees in applied math, statistics, OR, etc.  Some web sites that do provide useful information on careers for students majoring in mathematics include:
http://weusemath.org/
http://www.siam.org/careers/
http://www.amstat.org/careers/
http://www.ams.org/profession/career-info/career-index
http://www.beanactuary.org/
https://www.informs.org/Build-Your-Career/INFORMS-Student-Union/Career-Links-for-Students/Career-FAQs
You should get to know the "career services" office on your campus.  I encourage my undergraduate advisees to attend job fairs and look for internship opporunities starting very early in their undergraduate career.  Finding out that many employers have GPA cutoffs at 3.0 (or even 3.5) can have a powerful impact on a student who has been getting lower grades...

As a new faculty member you're going to have to decide how much effort to put into academic advising.  If advising isn't valued on your campus (which seems likely based on what you've said), then it may not be in your best interest to put a lot of effort in.  However, in my experience on tenure committees at our institution, the tenure committee often values teaching and advising much more than the faculty member believes or expects.

Thanks Brian. I've found that: (1) this isn't important for tenure here, but I'm not so worried about my tenure bid and my main concern is doing my job genuinely well; (2) it's not considered the advisor's job to intervene if (for example) the student is failing classes, and I don't think there's any way I could know this anyway (unless I asked them); (3) I'm not inclined to push for changes on a broader scale -- because I mainly want to focus on research, and more importantly because I don't have a clear role model in mind for how I would like advising to work.

When I was an undergraduate, I did not appreciate formal advising, and resented the fact that I had to get somebody's permission before I could register for classes. In retrospect, this was a rather strange attitude --- but it does mean that I have no experience of advising being valuable for the student.

If all that you're doing is telling the student which courses to take next semester, then you can (and should) be replaced by a computer.  Coaching and mentoring students requires the human touch, and that's where faculty advisors can really do something to help students.  This takes time and effort and typically isn't rewarded, which is why most academic advising isn't very helpful to students.  You'll have to decide how you want to approach this based on your own intrinsic motivation.

As an undergraduate who has been given blatantly wrong information by an advisor, please stay up to date with university policies.  Know how general education requirements work and what courses count for what requirements.  That's a really easy way to ensure that students will be able to graduate on time.

I sense a certain amount of resent towards your department for putting you in this position (and maybe rightfully so -- being an undergraduate adviser should not be an assistant professor's role). Even so, you are in this position and, being at an institution of higher education, it is your duty to do the best unto the students you are advising. So use your professional network if you have questions: the professor who had this job before you; staff in the department who worked with the previous adviser; and maybe equally important to the first option above, the advisers in other departments who may have been doing this for a few years already and who know the ropes.
If you don't have a professional relationship with someone whose expertise you need, write them an email: "Dear Dr X, I have recently been appointed as the undergraduate adviser in my department, but I find that I still have much to learn. Since you have been doing this job in your department for a few years already, would you be willing to let me pick your brain over lunch sometime next week?" Few older colleagues will be able to say "no" to such a request, and you may create yourself a source of knowledge for those cases you don't know how to handle. You may also create a bigger army than only yourself if you need to push back against the upper administration or ask them to provide better websites etc.

I think that this is generally good advice except that I would not depend on another faculty member to answer questions about degree requirements and other academic rules- as the OP noted, these rules can change frequently and your more experienced colleague might not be up to date.  The authoritative source of information will be the registrar's office or a central advising office of some sort.

I agree as far as facts are concerned. But colleagues who have done this job for a while already simply have a lot of experience on how to handle different situations. That experience is something worth utilizing.

Thank you for your answer. Unfortunately, I do not believe that the average professor here necessarily does this job well, even if they are experienced -- and so I am not especially willing to trust that a random colleague in a different department, e-mailed out of the blue, would have advice I would find useful. (Except when it comes to questions about courses offered by other departments, but I try not to say much about those anyway.)

That's a rather sad assessment of your colleagues :-(