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.

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.

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.