Alternatives to Proprietary Journal Publishing

In the comments to my last Sage post, Ted wrote

I think there are ways to begin publishing scholarly work that would circumvent unnecessarily restrictive publishers altogether. That, of course, opens up the larger issue of credibility, i.e., whether one’s university would consider publications that don’t appear under the imprimatur of a university or commercial scholarly press as worthwhile. Nevertheless, it’s something worth exploring….

We are indeed already there, and I don’t even think credibility is the main issue. Right now, open access has a much bigger track record in the sciences than the humanities, but there are examples of humanities journals catching up. First Monday, in which I published a piece not long ago, is open access and has a strong readership. And in new media studies, anyway, it clocks like a peer-reviewed journal. The Canadian Journal of Communication went open access and as a result, it’s articles are much more widely read. Will Straw tells me that his “Exhausted Commodities” essay in that journal gets a great deal of play in part because it is so accessible. CJC is also a peer-reviewed journal and at least in Canada clocks like that on tenure reviews.

Of course, Bad Subjects was open access before the concept existed, though we never saw ourselves as a traditional peer-reviewed academic journal (quite to the contrary).

The advantages to open access are obvious, but there are some major problems with it as well:

1. Open access eliminates the subscriber revenue stream. This means that journals that want print runs need some other source of income. Or they need to just post .pdfs and let people who want to read them print them for themselves. The fact is that with the large number of databases and library subscribers, more and more journals are consumed this way already.

2. Another side-effect of eliminating subscriber revenue is displacing ever more labor onto editors. If a journal doesn’t have a staff paid to produce it, then the labor falls to the editors. Given the sad state of copyediting these days, it’s not a huge leap, but it does significantly multiply the number of hours needed to produce a journal. For instance, for the Bad Subjects issues where I both edited and coded, I would say that I spent as much time coding as I did editing — a doubling of the labor. Until there is a way to pay people to produce journals as in the print model, I think we have a real problem with a purely online, open-access model. Scholarly associations can make this part of their dues and subsidize their own journals, but other journals will lose out unless they can secure some other kind of funding.

3. Also, bandwidth and storage are not free, and so either universities have to pony up the space, or libraries need to pool their resources to create some kind of consortium space for open access journals.

4. In Canada anyway, the funding agencies seem to favor open-access, but since they don’t guarantee funding for a long period of time, nor do they always pay for all of a journal’s operating costs, it’s a bit of gamble. It also means that you are submitting your journals operations to the oversight of a funding agency, which is a very different body from an editorial board.

To me, money and labor seem like the main obstacles to successful open access publishing in a wider sphere of the humanities. But for now, there are at least a few options. I can say next time I want to publish something for a big readership, I will be sending it to CJC.

As for books, well, I don’t see e-books replacing the paper-and-glue kind anytime soon (and I still love the codex as a technology), but that’s more Ted’s department than mine.

Happy Halloween

Last night was the annual Halloween party, which went off without a hitch. I can’t tell if Halloween has always been a big thing in Montreal (though it seems like the kind of thing that would be a big deal here) or if it’s recently become bigger as a result of the overall commercialization of the holiday.

Regardless, Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays, and ever since a party during graduate school at Feral Mom’s (before she was Feral), I have understood the virtues of a good Halloween party. Last night, I am pleased to say that while we did have some grad students not in costume (we say that costumes are encouraged but not required), all the faculty in attendance were in costume.

Though much more effort was expended on many wonderful costumes, the winner for “Most Disturbing” would have to be the latex horse head. It was perfectly proportioned to its wearer’s body so he really looked like a human being with a horse’s head. We learned that he took his son trick-or-treating with it one and actually frightened other kids in the process. He felt kind of bad about it, but not enough not to enjoy telling the story. The fact that he could actually consume a beverage through the horse’s mouth is all the more upsetting.

Sage Update

As you may know, I have been in an email exchange with various people at Sage since receiving a copy-protected version of my own article as my “author’s copy” for my New Media and Society essay on the mp3 format. (Click here for part 1 of the story.)

This week, I heard back from Sage’s “Rights and Business Department” and their essential position was that my rights were the same with the DRM and with paper copies. They use DRM to “protect their investment” and say that my rights are to distribute it as I wish so long as it’s not in “direct commercial competition” with their distribution.

But if you look at the author’s agreement I signed for this article (here, in .pdf format), it says nothing about 25 digital copies, proprietary formats, or anything else. Here’s the relevant part of my reply to the department.

Thank you for your reply.

I went back through the contract and indeed it does not specify anything about Sage’s rights to impose DRM on me as an author, nor does it say that I will be limited to providing 25 electronic copies. In fact, provisions 3 (“to supply on an individual basis to research colleagues”) and 4 (“to make available in whole or in part on a secure network at your institution”) imply that I should be able to use an unprotected .pdf in those situations. In point of fact, my rights with the digital version are considerably fewer than with the paper version of the offprints since paper comes with no built-in limits on my use, no requirements for an operating system, and no need to consent to a third-party companies DRM scheme which may or may not be sketchy and for which I am unlikely to receive technical support should there be a problem. My rights are also fewer than those enjoyed by readers of Sage journals, who may simply download an unprotected .pdf from their universities’ library systems (assuming an institutional subscription of course).

To reinterate: as an author and a scholar, I find your company’s unilateral action to be cause for grave concern. DRM ought to be announced in notes for contributors, so that they know what they are getting into before they submit to your journals. At the very least, if you are going to limit our rights, that ought to be spelled out in the contract we sign. It is very bad faith to simply impose DRM on authors without their prior knowledge or consent.

So, what now? What should my position be on publishing again with Sage? Are they correct that my rights are essentially the same as in print format and DRM only makes their limitations more apparent? It is true that my contract did not specify in what format I would receive my author’s copy, though it certainly implies that said author’s copy would not come in a proprietary DRM-encoded format. . . . I will have to give this some more thought, but my first impulse is that this really does feel like a betrayal, and it seems like the kind of thing academic authors should fight before we cede all of our rights through law-like applications of DRM.

Other People

Today’s post is about other people, sort of.

First, Tim Hecker, who came to McGill to do sonic history, also has a new album out which has him featured on Pitchfork. Here’s the review. Here’s his guest list column.

Second, I have been on the steering committee for a group called Media@McGill for some time (note that the link may or may not work — they’re still resolving some domain issues). With a great deal of help from the development office and some donor generosity, we received a major donation last year and last night was the launch event: Seymour Hersh. The talk was very well publicized, so much so that the Lyndon LaRouche posse were out in force during the Q and A. Also, the room had about 450 people, and air for 350. But the talk was very interesting. As Carrie said, you attend a talk like this to hear “behind the scenes” material aand he did not disappoint. He also followed up for awhile at the dinner afterward (yes, it was another one of those dinners, though I wouldn’t recommend the University Club for its food and we didn’t play any fun games around the dinner table). Hersh’s big take-away point was that 2007 is going to be a very bad year for the world. Bush is a lame-duck president and it’s not an election year, so expect an invasion of Iran. You don’t attend these sorts of talks to be cheered up.

Coming soon: the exciting resolution of the Sage story, and more on social class.