KindleReads from DragonWeb - Issue 3

In this issue I selected four texts that relate to the issue of academic publishing. The first article introduces the topic by signalling a shift in the future of academic publishing: while ebooks have not been the prime selling points for academic publishing houses so far, it is by now an irreversible trend - even today, but more so in the near future, textbooks and academic titles will sell in an ebook format more likely than in print. It is this point where the state of publishing, its framework and institution becomes interesting - this is what the two articles taken from The Scholarly Kitchen tackles. The texts show how and why one could or should set up a new university press, and what this new start-up can teach about the changed situation to established university presses. Finally, the inevitable question of licensing pops up - what type of copyright one should opt for? Bethany Nowviskie's answer is one that earned my symptahy - the least restrictive possible, if you really mean well, just wait and see, it might have some benefitial return.

Table of Contents

- The E-Reader Effect

- Creating a New University Press

- What Upstarts Can Teach Established Presses

- why, oh why, CC-BY?

The E-Reader Effect

by Steve Kolowich

For technology reputed to be the future of reading, e-books have had a hard go of it in higher education. Students have for years declined to purchase electronic versions of their textbooks, and instructors have largely refrained from assigning them except when they are given no choice.

University presses, in many cases, have been even less successful than textbook publishers in selling electronic versions of their books. A new survey by the Association of American University Presses suggests that as of last December, e-book sales or licenses accounted for less than 3 percent of total revenue for the overwhelming majority of university presses.

Meanwhile, 60 percent of respondents expressed “serious concern” about the viability of their current business models. In an era of flat or declining print sales, university presses might be discouraged by the fact that e-books, to which most sectors of publishing have pinned their hope for a rebound in an era of flat or declining print sales and scarce resources, have failed to gain traction.

But there is anecdotal evidence from some presses that e-book sales have jumped in the months since the association collected its data. Several presses contacted by Inside Higher Ed reported that their e-book sales have risen significantly in the first part of 2011. While e-books still account for a small proportion of total sales even in these cases, the presses see the uptick as an encouraging sign that there is a market for electronic versions of “serious nonfiction” works after all — and that market might finally be stirring.

Last year, as winter approached, the University of Kentucky Press found itself in a position similar to that of most of its peers at the time: Its e-books accounted for a negligible sliver of the press’s sales: 1.6 percent, according to John Hussey, the director of sales. But in February, e-book sales skyrocketed to 11.3 percent. (Hussey calls this “the Christmas boom,” speculating that a lot of people got Kindles and iPads as gifts.)

The boom tempered a bit between March and April, with e-book sales dipping to between 6 and 8 percent, month-to-month. But last month they jumped again, Hussey says; although May figures have not yet been finalized, e-book sales at Kentucky have crept back toward 11 percent.

The University of North Carolina Press has also seen its e-book sales tick up in recent months, albeit at a more modest rate — from 1.5 percent between July 2009 and July 2010, to a projected 4 percent between July 2010 and next month. That includes a steep rise between January and March. The Johns Hopkins University Press says it has seen similar growth.

These are not huge gains in dollar terms, but they are significant for a couple of reasons, says Kate Torrey, director of the North Carolina press. First, they are the only part of the press that is growing. Second, the trend suggests that despite the medium’s reputation for being good for casual reading but not so much studying or research, there are people out there who are interested in using e-books for more than just newspapers and beach novels.

“These are people who are buying serious scholarly books and books of really enduring value, and seem to be buying them in pretty significant numbers,” Torrey says.

Also significant is which books they are buying. At Johns Hopkins, more than 70 percent of the e-books sold since last July have been “backlist” titles — books that had been out for more than a year. At the University of Kentucky, 87 percent were backlist. At the University of North Carolina, 90 percent. That means that the presses’ recent success in moving e-books has not come as a result of any kind of concerted marketing effort to get customers to spring for the electronic versions. Rather, it has happened despite a lack of such efforts.

“The front list is where the majority of the publicity and promotion activities are focused,” says Torrey. “And so these books are enjoying success that is not driven by the marketing and publicity activity around new books.”

The relative success of backlist e-book titles in the absence of hype campaigns gives us a glimpse into the future of university press marketing if and when e-books rise to preeminence, says Hussey, the Kentucky sales director. Selling print books is all about hooking browsers, he says. That means sexy covers, grabby titles, and shelling out for prime placement on bookstore racks.

Pushing e-books, on the other hand, will turn on how well presses are able to optimize the electronic versions for search-and-discovery, Hussey says: less cover design and layout, more metadata and keyword-friendly titles and abstracts.

He points to Kentucky’s top-selling e-book this year, a Holocaust memoir called The Dentist of Auschwitz. The book, written by concentration camp survivor Benjamin Jacobs, was originally published in 1995. Hussey believes its newfound success as an e-book can be attributed, at least in part, to its amenability to bookstore database queries. “Great book, terrible cover design,” observes Hussey. “But it has fantastic keywords and metadata in its title.”

About three-quarters of university presses are actively digitizing their backlists, and most of those had digitized between 25 and 50 percent of their backlist titles as of the end of last year, according to the Association of American University Presses study. Most are digitizing them in PDF or XML formats; fewer (14 percent) are using the more versatile EPUB format, which adjusts to fit the presentation styles of various types of e-readers. (More presses — 63 percent — are providing new titles in EPUB format.)

Only five out of 89 university press officials who filled out the survey said backlist digitization is not a priority. Of all respondents, most listed lack of staff, IT resources, and investment capital as the greatest barriers to backlist digitization.

Source URL:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/06/01/e_books_becoming_a_greater_priority_of_university_presses_in_the_age_of_ipad_and_kindle

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Creating a New University Press

by The Scholarly Kitchen

Image via Wikipedia

While there is a great deal of controversy over the proper role of the university press in the world today, less thought has been given to what it would mean to start a completely new university press. There are exceptions to this. A few years ago, Rice University started up a press, but it was not successful and the university soon after removed its support. By and large, though, discussion concerning university presses touches on different topics:

- What is the proper relationship between a press and its institution’s library?

- Should presses partly or completely embrace Open Access?

- What is the best way to sell ebooks to libraries?

- Can anything be done to offset the continuing decline of monograph sales?

- And the really big question: How can you operate a press such that its parent university doesn’t have to subsidize it?

It seems useful to me to look at these questions from a different angle. If someone were to consider starting a press today, how would he or she go about it? What would it look like?

The point here is heuristic — not actually how to get this done, but to think through the question in order to learn more about academic publishing. It’s highly improbable that anyone would actually pick up the ball and run with it. If anything, the trend is in the opposite direction, with institutional support in one way or the other (e.g., reduced purchasing of university  press books by academic libraries, lowered direct subsidies from parent institutions) being cut back. To create a new university press would require highly motivated sponsors to step up to the challenge of multi-year financing, and that does not appear to be in the offing.  A new press is thus a thought experiment; where we go with that thought is unknown.

New publishing ventures always begin with an editorial impulse. Although much talk about publishing today is about technical matters and such things as “integrating the workflow,” no publisher ever started out by focusing on production or process engineering. Publishers begin by asserting what kind of books or journals they want to publish. This could be stated by domain (“We see an opportunity to build a list in Asian studies”) or by ideology (“We want to cultivate authors with progressive politics”). Of course, once they begin to get their editorial program going, they have to turn their attention to production, operations, and finance, and they have to do this fast. But they start by identifying what kind of content they wish to publish.

Here a new press would have a decided disadvantage, as it would be exceedingly difficult to compete with established presses in areas that have been cultivated over the years. Imagine the challenge for an editor who is asked to build a list in American history in competition with the editors of Harvard University Press or in European history (competing with OUP) or architecture (MIT) or sociology (Chicago) or anthropology (California). The list of established presses with highly regarded programs in specific areas is a long one and would include many smaller presses. Established presses have built a network of authors and advisors, which help support their programs and brands. An economist or philosopher knows precisely where he or she wants to submit a manuscript for publication, and a new press would have to overcome that.

A new press therefore might make the decision to enter the fray by taking a different approach. If the established presses have staked out a field with a particular perspective — a school of thought, as it were — perhaps a new press could enter the marketplace by backing an emerging perspective. But here again this would be difficult to do, as the established press could adjust its own program to coopt the new approaches. Thus an economics list dominated by Keynesians might make room for some members of the Chicago tradition, for example (or perhaps it would be the other way ’round). Although one should never underestimate the value of an outstanding acquisitions editor, a start-up press would find it very difficult to work in established fields, inasmuch as the network of advisors and marketing partners tilt the field in favor of publishers that are already active in the marketplace.

Knowledge and fields of knowledge do not stand still, of course, and an entirely new press might consider working in areas that are newly emerging, where established presses cannot be said to have staked out the territory. Here there is a different problem, and that is that the scholarly book itself is a mature form, with little growth and perhaps even shrinking market conditions. However creative an editorial staff might be, it is an uphill struggle to start a new university press with the aim of publishing books.

This is not to say that established presses should not be publishing books. I would say just the opposite, that they should continue to publish books and they should even publish more of them because they already have a presence in the marketplace that would be hard to displace.  Indeed, some established presses can thrive by publishing books — and many do.  But for a new academic publisher, the book as a format, whether in print or in bits, is not a promising path.

There are two corollaries to this.  First, this is a proof of the editorial fallacy, the notion that in a time of significant change in the publishing industry, a publishing organization’s strategy can be anchored in the editorial department. It cannot — editorial is what gets us into publishing, editorial is what we like about publishing, but innovation takes place elsewhere.  The second corollary is that all the estimable work that is going into e-books today is not really innovative. E-books are books, and books are a mature form, whether they are sold in a local bookshop or accessed from a cloud platform as part of a massive library aggregation. If we are looking for innovation, as a new company must, we have to search farther afield.

Our aspirants may decide that getting into books may thus be difficult and consider other options.  How about journals?  Here the path is not rosy either. The advantages of the established publishers are very great–arguably greater in journals than in books because of the competition from commercial publishers–and a strategy born of editorial smarts alone will find it tough-going. A new journals publisher will also have to wrestle with the serious budgetary situation at academic libraries, which comprise 85% of the journals market. (Libraries make up about 25% of university press book purchases.)  If a library is cutting its materials budget by 10%, by 15%, perhaps more, how hospitable will it be to a new publication from a new publisher? Entrepreneurial spirit can overcome many obstacles, but it is not clear how and why a new university press would wish to buck the trend toward library defunding.

I have written on the Kitchen before that any new publisher today will start with a born-digital strategy. This would be as true for a new university press as for any other publisher. A born-digital strategy is more than the technology (everything is always more than the technology); it is also a different way of doing business, from relations with authors to the management of the distribution channels. For example, a born-digital publisher has little chance of getting books into bricks-and-mortar bookstores, and a solely electronic publishing program may be challenged to come up with meaningful membership benefits for a professional society. On the other hand, starting from a digital-first-and-only position potentially opens up new kinds of publishing. These new kinds may be unproven, but they do give a start-up press a chance.

One new kind of publishing to consider is the author-pays open access model pioneered by BioMed Central (now owned by Springer) and emulated by the Public Library of Science, SAGE, and Wiley Blackwell, among others.  This model works; what is less clear is how big it can get, how many authors are willing and capable of paying fees, and whether this is a successful niche model or something that could be expanded to cover all of scholarship.  My own hunch is that the author-pays model requires an aggressive and creative marketing strategy to break out of the “noise” of the flood of information. If PLoS is the model for author-pays open access, then the bar is set very high, as PLoS is arguably the top marketing organization in scholarly communications today. Very few organizations, whether established or newly created, can hope to engender the excitement in the marketplace that PLoS has worked so hard to attain.

A curious thing about author-pays publishing, however, is that it has wholly arisen outside of specific institutional contexts. Virtually all universities have institutional repositories, but the growing open access services are mostly found beyond the academy’s walls. This raises the question of whether a new university press should not be a university press at all but an external academic press, an organization that does not look to a parent institution for support.  In some respects, this is almost an acknowledgment of what is already going on within universities, where administrators are often reluctant to subsidize a press. Setting up shop away from a particular institution has limitations and benefits, which go hand in hand.  A university can provide seed funding and editorial support, but a university can also withdraw that funding or create obstacles for the press to identify other sources of funding; and editorial support can also restrain a press from exploring new media and partnerships. For example, it’s easy to imagine an editorial board vetoing the idea of an author-pays service as the charge of “vanity publishing,” even if inappropriate, is irksome.

New ventures should not be restricted to forms of repository publishing, however. Once a press decides that it is going to be born digital, a host of new opportunities arises, not all of which are proven, of course, but the price of working on a start-up is the very great risk of failure. A new press, for example, may choose to work initially, even exclusively, in the new tablet ecosystem, publishing scholarly works that may be shorter and more highly interactive than those handled by established presses. This is not an idle suggestion. Consider the fact that library budgets are being cut, but sales of the iPad are exploding. Where would you put your money?  Or an aspiring publisher may look about and borrow from the Netflix model:  large aggregations of digital content sold directly to end-users. Few established presses could hope to launch such a venture because their resources are tied up with servicing legacy authors and customers.

Lest the examples of Apple and NetFlix, coupled with  the reference to working outside a university, make anyone nervous that this is really going to be a commercial publisher, even a consumer publisher, and not a new kind of mission-based entity serving the needs of scholars, let’s be clear that our upstart press would certainly be set up as a not-for-profit.  There are some kinds of scholarly publishing projects that simply cannot reach a big enough market to support them.  Thus we should expect injections of capital at various points:  during the start-up stage, for specific costly projects, for starting new programs, etc.  A new press would thus have to be able to tap the community of philanthropies and wealthy donors, who will look for the tax-advantaged status that only a NFP can provide.

Thus our new “university” press sits outside any particular institution, is born-digital, avoids areas where established publishers already have staked out territory, experiments with publishing forms and distribution channels, and is a NFP.  There are entities somewhat like this already: PLoS, the Humanities EBook program at ACLS, OCLC, and JSTOR (a client) come to mind.  There will be more.

Source URL: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2011/05/25/creating-a-new-university-press-the-first-of-a-two-part-post/
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What Upstarts Can Teach Established Presses

by The Scholarly Kitchen

Image via Wikipedia

As noted in the first part of this two-part series, established university presses have neither the luxury nor the necessity to speculate about setting up shop across the street as independent entities. For better or worse, their fate is tied to their relationship with their parent institutions. Their strategy naturally differs from that of an entirely new press, as the environment they operate in is structurally different. I wish to underscore this point:  the strategies of an established organization and a start-up company are necessarily different. Much angst is incurred by established companies that mistakenly believe that strategy is strategy, that one size fits all. This error in thinking is beautifully and inadvertently captured in the title of Jeff Jarvis’s book, “What Would Google Do?”

What’s good for the Google is not necessarily what’s good for the gander.

Contemplating the creation of a new press makes it very clear that the biggest obstacle to starting something entirely new is that the established publishers are very good at what they do and would be hard to displace.  I know that many people feel otherwise about the university press world today, but I simply cannot agree with them.  The press world is indeed under considerable pressure, but it’s not as though someone could come along and say, “I can do a better job than Columbia or Indiana” and jump in and swiftly become successful.  The presses have established networks to draw on, important brands, and know-how in critical areas.  To compete with the presses today does not call for a new press; it calls for a new idea.

The established presses might do well to examine precisely where and how they would be hard to displace.  I have written about this before, but a good place to start is with Peter Dougherty’s (Director, Princeton University Press) “manifesto” on scholarly publishing, which makes a case for “the character of our content.”   If publishing good books with hard ideas is among the things that an established press does well, and if this activity represents one of the barriers to entry for new academic publishers, then it makes perfect, strategic sense for a press to continue to do this and even augment its activity in this area.  Thus, the reports of some presses cutting back on title output seems misplaced to me.  Better to align a book program with emerging fields, especially if they are supported by the parent institution, than to scale back the operation.  For if a press decides to cut back on books in order to pursue new ventures (sometimes masked by the phrase “a new business model”), the press will be entering an area where a start-up organization can compete on equal terms.

Indeed, an established press should not cede an inch to an upstart in the established press’s territory.  This means that the thing that presses uniquely do very well (publish important books about ideas) should be extended everywhere:  in print, in print on demand, in every digital file format, for every reading device, in digital aggregations for libraries, and in the emerging methods of marketing directly to end-users (D2C for direct to consumer).  It is a matter of semantics whether one would call this “innovation.”  I would not; I would reserve the term for the truly new.  But extending a franchise to new formats and new market segments requires insight and energy, and all established presses must engage in this.

An established press must also be on guard when an upstart publisher attempts to encroach on the established press’s network of contacts.  For example, let’s imagine a university press that has published three books by one author.  One day the press discovers that the author has been approached by a new entity to write a 50,000-word essay synthesizing developments in the field, to be marketed as part of a subscription directly to researchers; and what’s more, the piece will not undergo peer review.  This is a ticklish situation for an established press.  No peer review?  Of course, the game being played here is clear:  no peer review because the author, not the work, has already met high professional standards (a phenomenon I call “provostial publishing”).  And what to do about that D2C subscription model?  On the other hand, this is the press’s author.  A press in this situation may make the determination that the best strategy is cooptation.  And it may not be a good idea to wait too long to get around to doing this.

This is a roundabout way of saying that established presses should look to new publishers in any field as a source of ideas; if you only look to the competition in your own field, you will overlook the barbarians and crazies who are slipping inside the border.  While university presses are occupied today with the (important) task of creating large-scale digital collections for academic libraries, they also should be studying the new apps being created for the iPad by educators and game developers and, closer to home, companies such as Morgan & Claypool,  an early born-digital publisher that developed a new editorial approach for technical publications.  Where is the Morgan & Claypool of Women’s Studies or literary criticism, I wonder.  Recently I sat for several hours in a coffee shop with an entrepreneur who showed me one educational app on his iPad after another, the riches of the presentation defined as much by quantity as quality.  “Is that all there is to it?” I asked of one app.  “That’s the level of development the platform requires,” was his response.  Of course, you have to sift through a lot of material before coming away with one good idea.  I suppose shoplifters have the same problem.

The difficult balance for an established press is between its historical strengths (the brand, the book and journal formats, diversified distribution channels, a network of authors and advisors) and the compelling, often mandated, changes in the marketplace.  We know when a press can be too conservative; everyone picks on them all the time; some librarians like to hoot about how backward presses are digitally.   But presses can also be too daring at times.  Many got involved with digital projects early on that did not pan out, costing the presses scarce investment capital and, worse, souring them on future experimentation.   The key is to exercise mature judgment (humanities students take note!) without being unduly conservative.

Upstart publishers will challenge established publishers on many fronts, but which are the challenges that must be met, which coopted, which ignored?  Ebooks–yes, do that, and do it quickly (most presses already are).  And texts of intermediate length, neither article nor book–yes, do that before an entrepreneur begins to siphon off your authors.  A pause may be in order, however, when presented with some of the publishing programs now being initiated in libraries.  Libraries are fundamentally different from publishing concerns, and the publishing programs libraries are incubating may not be something to copy or to try to coopt.  This does not for a minute mean that these programs are without value; it simply means that there are activities that presses may be wise to avoid.

The term “library publishing” covers a lot of ground.  I am referring here to the creation of open access institutional repositories.  It’s not relevant to my point what kind of content goes into them, whether copies of faculty papers, student papers, digitized books, scanned collections of primary documents, and so on.  Publishers may have specific reservations about some of these items (Are the digitized books still under copyright?), but the real issue is one of business model.

As noted on the Kitchen before, publishers have four ways and no more to finance their operations.  They can have users or their proxies pay for content (the traditional model); they can have authors or their proxies pay for publication services (the model used by PLOS and SAGE Open, among others); they can earn revenue through the aggregation and packaging of audiences to sell advertising and other marketing services; or they can seek support either from a parent institution or other supporting group (e.g., wealthy individuals, grants, etc.).  Many organizations have hybrid models (e.g., sell subscriptions AND sell advertising), but even the hybrids have only four kinds of revenue streams to work with.  Library publishing falls into the fourth category, where the business model is, like that of a library’s traditional functions, supported primarily by an institutional sponsor.

The fundamental difference between libraries and publishers is not found in the mission statements, which may sound very much alike–and may sound like the mission statements of a thousand other organizations.  The important difference is that libraries are set up as cost centers, whereas university publishers are set up as subsidized profit centers.  This means that publishers have earned revenue through the sale of books and journals.  With university presses under so much financial pressure right now, taking on projects that will effectively increase the requirement of institutional funding is not a prudent step.  Most universities would like their presses to fund themelves entirely as profit centers without requiring a subsidy at all.

It may come as a surprise, then, to find a growing number of presses being placed organizationally within academic libraries.  The declared reasons have to do with shared mssions, shared goals, and synergistic operations, but I suspect administrative convenience is a big part of it.  Let’s imagine a press with costs of $5 million a year and revenue of $4.5 million.  The deficit of $500,000 is made up by the parent university.  In financially challenging times, the university administration may have to justify that subsidy to the institution’s governing board.  On the other side of the campus is the library, a cost center with a budget of $25 million a year.  If you roll the press’s half-million-dollar loss (a loss because this is what shortfalls in profit centers are called) into the library’s overall budget, the problem of the press’s subsidy seems to disappear.  This is what is known as synergy.

While upstart programs wherever they emerge can often serve as good if unwitting sources of inspiration for established presses, it is important that they not be taken on their own terms.  Open access, for example, was once thought to be a tool that would topple the entire STM publishing establishment.  Now it is evolving into yet another profit center for a number of publishers, some of them in the for-profit world.  Established presses should study start-ups carefully and learn from them, but resist any temptation to go native.  To take on the worldview of the upstarts gives too much away, all that has accumulated in an extablished publisher’s brand and practices.

Source URL: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2011/05/26/what-upstarts-can-teach-established-presses/
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why, oh why, CC-BY?

by Bethany Nowviskie

Last night, I joined the tail-end of an interesting conversation on Twitter about the utility of NC (“non-commercial”) clauses in Creative Commons licensing. Some time ago, I quietly dropped the non-commercial specification from my own blog and Flickr stream, switching my license from CC-BY-NC to CC-BY. Yesterday’s exchange of viewpoints has prompted me to explain why.

The CC-BY-NC license I first adopted permitted attributed use of my content but restricted that use (without further, explicit permission from me) to non-commercial republication venues. CC-BY, on the other hand, means I’m only asking that my name appear in some way attached to my words (or images, or other intellectual property). US law asserts that the moment I have “fixed” my thought into some expression I have tacitly copyrighted it — meaning that any republication (beyond fair use and without my explicit permission) is pretty much a form of theft. Unattributed re-use would be plagiarism.

Baby, I’m givin’ it away.

When it comes to scholarly communication, I stand in Jeffersonian discomfort with the notion of “monopolies of invention” (a subject I’ve addressed before). In the humanities — where we are constantly and rightly concerned with our ability to reach broad audiences and articulate the public good of investment in the liberal arts — assertions of exclusive ownership may well “produce more embarrassment than advantage to society.” Commercial exploitation? We should be so lucky.

So, why did I adopt an NC designation, only to change it? I had had a fuzzy notion about non-commercial use being more in line with the impulses that were driving me toward the “copyleft” approach of Creative Commons in the first place. That is, I wanted my information to be free — so what could be more perfect than asking others to distribute it freely?

On further reflection — prompted in part by the experience of my colleagues in trying to reconcile disparate licenses of well-intentioned contributors to the Hacking the Academy project — I came to understand that my “non-commercial” requirement was actually weakening the Commons.

First, I realized that I was discouraging or at least slowing down any possible re-use of my content by requiring that people ask my permission. Yes, there is, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick muses, something unsettling in deliberately relinquishing control over one’s intellectual property — especially for academics working within a system that almost only rewards individual achievement, and which teaches us to polish our ideas until they are bright and perfect gems, to be carefully and deliberately placed for best effect. But I could only (and that with some difficulty) imagine edge cases in which I would not automatically grant permission for re-use of content I had published here. Which led me to my second conclusion.

More restrictive licenses, for me — for the kind of thing I write and work on, for the paths and audiences I imagine for that work, and for the kind of #alt-ac scholar I want personally to be — read like progressive degrees of arrogance. This goes beyond an admittedly flip, knee-jerk “we should be so lucky” reaction. Does an NC license imply that I believe my content to be of recognizable commercial value of which I should be in full and solitary control? (Well, I did blog it, after all.) No, it’s more the sheer, unthinking presumption I now see in well-meaning “NC” restrictions.

I’m just not bright enough to presume to predict financial aspects of future publishing models. Limiting my default scope to non-commercial ventures seems presumptuous and naïve. Current presses and projects I admire are struggling, and if any of my content, bundled in some form that can support its own production by charging a fee, helps humanities publishers to experiment with new ways forward — well, that’s precisely why I CC-licensed it in the first place. I also want to minimize my participation in any system that could lead to an “orphaned works” problem. Perhaps there’s a very clear answer to the question of who gives permission on my behalf if I am dead or incapacitated and my heirs are unreachable or unresponsive. My guess, however — since I am no writer of importance — is that, in my absence, any little roadbump on the path to permission will virtually assure my content not be republished. If it’s already becoming evident that more restrictive enfranchisements slow down re-use of Creative Commons-licensed content, and that US copyright law is geared to support the interests of big business — how hard do we expect future small-potatoes humanities editors to try?

However, it would also be naïve to assert that no-one stands to get rich on humanities content. George Williams is right to cite price-gouging in textbook publishing (and I would add bundled journal subscriptions) as a factor that gives pause to potential droppers of the NC restriction. But (and here I’m back to questioning the ethos-to-ego ratio of the humanities scholar), do I really think that drips and drabs of my own content will make a difference in these vast machines? The textbook will go on without me — and that means without my work and whatever good its inclusion might have done, for me professionally and for the spheres of knowledge and praxis I want to advance.

To take a more pragmatic stance, CC BY-ND is about as much control as I’d ever want to exert in those situations. The “ND” stands for “no derivatives,” meaning that — if attached to a CC-BY license — future publishers (commercial and non-commerical) would be able to re-use my work only if it is clearly attributed to me and not altered in any way. This would be my opportunity to contribute a coherent thought to a collection and come closer to assurance (thus addressing one of my imagined “edge cases”) that my words are not twisted in support of a project or ideology with which I’d disagree.

Fundamentally, I’ve concluded that CC-BY is more in line with the practical and ideological goals of the Commons, and the little contribution I want to make to it. I still have a residual clingyness about my words that I can only assume comes from eight years spent in pursuit of a doctoral degree. I’m getting over it, though, and am even more cavalier about my non-textual work — software, interface design, and sketches or photographs. If Flickr would allow me to remove the “attribution” clause from my snapshots, I’d be giving them away even more freely than my words. I’d be placing most of them explicitly in the public domain.

For humanities scholarship, and for the kind of institutional and administrative mutterings I publish here, I truly believe — there’s no where to go but out.

Tags: intellectual property, scholarly-communication

Source URL: http://nowviskie.org/2011/why-oh-why-cc-by/
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KindleReads from DragonWeb - Issue 3

http://www.dragonweb.hu/projektek/e-konyv/#kindlereads

June 16, 2011

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