(facepalm) You should really do a state-level corporation search before accusing people of federal tax evasion. The Massachusetts Secretary of State’s website lists all twelve of the JMLR’s Annual Reports (plus Articles of Incorporation), and Stuart Shieber isn’t listed as an officer in a single one.

This is research methods for first-year Arts students.

The only problem seems to be that most scientists and researchers aren’t really proficient in self-typsetting, ala LaTeX, or managing such a project. BUT, that sort of stuff seems to slowly be changing Besides comp.sci people, Math & Physics researchers routinely submit to their journals using LaTeX, so maybe it will spread to biologists, chemists, social scientists, etc. Can’t see it spreading too easily to Literature types (but who knows).

Also, I have no background in law or publication, but even I can pretty clearly see that Microtome is what’s called a “Publisher”, and JMLR would be what’s called a ‘client’. I /think/ they’d use this thing called a ‘contract’ to work out the details of having JMLR printed and distributed.
It looks like I can purchase an archival quality print of an entire year’s worth of JMLR articles for ~$240. OR I could go to a ‘mainstream’ publisher and spend $50 for a pdf of a single article. Or, if I wanted to have an Artificial Intelligence article of my own published (and to be clear I don’t work in that field), I can submit it for free to one of the top journals in that field with a high impact factor and expect it to be well read and well cited, or I can submit it to a ‘mainstream’ publisher, pay a fee for things like color images and excess pages, and pay something like $2,000 to allow other people to access the pdf’s for free.

It’s pretty clear who’s stealing from who in this system.