Publishing, Copyright, and Open-Access | Technological Indeterminism

"The Internet has dominated discussions of copyright at least since the rise of Napster in the late 1990s, and probably earlier.  The Internet has allowed the rapid replication and dissemination of most forms of intellectual property, sometimes to the detriment of copyright holders and sometimes, surprisingly, to their advantage.  It has also brought into relief the uneasy relationship between scholarship and intellectual property that has long existed in the academy.  Plagiarism is the most damnable of the deadly sins in history, as it is in most of the humanities.  For the last hundred-plus years historians have jealously guarded their words – and rightfully so, as those words were their primary product.  And yet, even as they invoked much of its spirit, my impression is that historians have rarely explicitly summoned copyright to deal with plagiarists.  Punishment instead has involved loss of status and censure from professional organizations.  This is because historians wish their work to be easily accessible even as they wish to retain both authorship and control over their work.  In this post, I’ll be exploring the interactions of the copyright (and by extension capitalist) system with academic publishing, the open-access movement, and the Internet. Over the last four or five years, the founders of Academia.edu have built their user base into the millions on the promise of creating a community where scholars could disseminate their work to encourage both a wide readership and timely feedback.  The Academia.edu community hit its first major speed bump recently when journal publisher Elsevier began sending DMCA takedown notices by the hundreds, asking that the website pull from circulation articles that had been published in one of Elsevier’s journals.  Many users of Academia.edu have bristled at the takedown notices, angered by the assertion that they do not control their own work.  And this perhaps points to the difference between copyright and authorship, with most academics valuing the latter much more highly than the former. The primacy of authorship, rather than copyright, in the minds of academics would explain the popularity of the open-access movement.  Those in favor of open access to scholarly material retain their esteem of authorship, but believe that scholarship works best when it is easily available to fellow scholars, a view that I wholeheartedly agree with.  Publishers and more cautious academics, however, worry that too much open-access will lead to the collapse of the entire scholarly publishing apparatus.  After all, university presses are already struggling to make ends meet, to the detriment of historians interested in publishing monographs.  Those in favor of open-access would argue that it is companies like Elsevier, who control journals and article databases, that cloud the issue with their need to turn a profit.  And a recent study of journals in the social sciences and humanities shows that the open-access model is still not viable, even if authors go the route of “gold” open access and pay thousands of dollars for the rights to each article.  (This model may actually work in the sciences, but only because science articles are much cheaper to produce since they generally require less time investment from the editorial/referee apparatus.)[1] Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Scholarly Communication at the Modern Language Association, argues that part of the original mission of universities – and university presses – was not just the generation of new knowledge but also its dissemination.  Fitzpatrick thinks that the responsibility for solving this problem therefore rests with universities, who should stop expecting their presses to break even (or sometimes turn a profit) and instead support them in their efforts to disseminate the work of the professional academics that the university employs.  This will require experimentation with online forms of publishing and the patience to see those experiments bear fruit, then adjust accordingly.[2] ..."