I’m hustling off the grid for the rest of today to work on my review of Everything is Miscellaneous–quick preview: miscell-delicious!– but wanted to note an important warning to MFA in Writing students in a post at Politics, Technology, and Language.
If you have even the slightest urge to publish through traditional channels–an essay in a traditional literary journal, or even, God willing, a book–pick your MFA program carefully, or you could end up in a program where your cherished manuscript will be placed on the open Web when you graduate, rendering it unpublishable. Note also that you may think you aren’t going to write for publication–but the MFA process can steer you in ways you never imagined.
Before you commit to an MFA, find out whether the university requires the electronic deposit of theses and dissertations, known as ETDs. In and of itself, that’s not a bad thing–it can be a very good thing for the “last copy” of your thesis to be in digital form, particularly if it’s backed up in various places–but the next questions are key:
- Does the university force all ETDs onto the open Web, or may the student choose how and when his or her thesis is published?
- If the default action is to publish on the open Web, how easy is it to exercise exceptions? Can the student choose, or is it up to the student’s department or another agency?
- How long are the exceptions (sometimes called embargoes)? (One ETD policy I know of has a three-month “embargo”–a wee drap of time in the traditional-publishing universe.)
- Who decides the ETD policy, and how sympathetic is this group to departments still publishing in traditional models?
- If the university doesn’t have an ETD program or policy, is one imminent?
PTL captured the essence of this problem; I hope sometime soon to write about its origins, and about its implications for humanities departments. (The AWP has taken a firm stand against ETD excesses.) As usual, it all boils down to the human comedy, with all the expected players and motivations. Since last winter I had been heavily involved in researching ETD policies, but I was unable to write about this topic until now because I was engaged in proposing changes to a campus-wide policy. After reading PTL’s post, I remembered, hey, I don’t work there any more!
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Posted on this day, other years:
- Passion Quilt Meme: Reading Sets You Free - 2008
- Parade rest - 2006
- FRL Spotlight Review: McPhee's Marvelous Gardens - 2005
At the university where I work, this is the release language that goes with electronic deposit of MFA theses:
“The author retains exclusive copyright (including all rights thereunder) in the deposited work. The author grants to the XYZ Library a non-exclusive license to reformat, copy or otherwise reproduce the deposited work for preservation or public access purposes for the duration of its copyright.â€
The explicit discussion that went into developing this language was that if someone is offered a publishing contract for their work, the electronic version immediately goes off open access status in our institutional repository and into “hardcopy equivalent” local access only.
I don’t think it’s true that electronic deposit inherently renders a work unpublishable simply because it has already been published, if the author retains copyright and so can sign over copyright to a commercial publisher at another time. For example, John Scalzi’s book -Old Man’s War- (Tor) was originally serialized on his website, http://www.scalzi.com. (Another of his books, -Agent to the Stars- [Subterranean Press], is *still* downloadable from his site, but that’s a somewhat different case, as Subterranean put out a limited edition only).
That said, it’s good for authors to have choices, and they for sure should know what they’re getting into when they choose a program.
Replying above has prompted me to contact the relevant people here to ask if we can change “public access” to “local public access,” in order to be clearer. So, thanks for making me think of that.
On a practical level, this has a lot less to do with ETD policies than it does with publishers’ definitions of what is “published.” A digital photo of a painting doesn’t render the original canvas unsellable and a draft physics paper on arxiv.org doesn’t preclude later publication of the author’s findings–should MFA students be excluded from university policy so publishing houses can acquire sole rights to monetize their “intellectual property?” Universities exist to promote the creation and dissemination of knowledge–how can adding embargoes to ETDs possibly support this goal?
“Universities exist to promote the creation and dissemination of knowledge–how can adding embargoes to ETDs possibly support this goal?” To start with, by honoring the wishes of the scholar and his or her scholarly community regarding publication rights for theses. Web-only ETD policies are above all paternalistic, and serve the needs of the ETD policy makers far better than they do the scholar or his or her department.
The example of a painting is a particularly bad one, because a painting exists in its full fidelity as a physical object; the picture is more like a catalog record than anything else. The example of a scholarly article published in a disciplinary repository is equally poor, because the vast majority of scholarly work is not publishable through traditional means and benefits everyone by availability through Web distribution.
Regarding the serialized book that was published: I publish a lot online, and sometimes it has found its way back into traditional publishing routes. Some writing students may benefit from publishing online, and that should be their right, just as a department should be able to encourage students to go “open” with their theses if their writing is best served by that model. But I know from experience–as do the blogger at Politics, Technology, and Language, the students at Bowling Green, and many MFA students and other writers–that the predominant publishing model for creative writing is overwhelmingly traditional. I predict that will change, but it should evolve naturally and not be engineered by those who are seeking bragging rights for the largest repositories or the most “liberal” ETD policy.
Writing departments do not earn their bread and butter by announcing that so-and-so posted her thesis to the Web; they gain recognition from student achievements within the exclusivity of the publishing model. You may not like that, it may not be the trend for the future, but it is how things are today–and the scholar, not the university, should decide the disposition of his or her work product.
We are talking about exceptions on behalf of very small communities within the world of higher education–and yet we’re talking about more than that. We’re talking about who gets to decide; we’re talking about honoring diversity with publishing models; we’re debating the issue of who owns the work product. Let’s not pretend this is strictly about furthering the goals of scholarly communication.
Well, speaking as one who helped design an ETD policy in a previous job… I didn’t think of this one. I probably ought to have, and if I design another ETD policy, I will.
I have a problem, though, which is that the Slumbering Behemoth (i.e. faculty at large) is scared as hell of what it doesn’t understand. You make a good case for MFA students, although I note that like many cases against OA, it hinges on publisher intransigence; I agree with Mike that I’m not terribly inclined to coddle publishers’ hegemony over communications processes. Since creative writers do get directly paid for their work products, though, I’m perfectly willing to admit that web publication by ETD without prior consent (and by that I mean “ETD policy made clear during the application process to a given program”) is a bad thing.
Returning to the Slumbering Behemoth, though — it mostly doesn’t have good arguments. It’s just unreasoningly scared, and it’ll seize on any excuse it can find not to change. First I had to exempt the patentable stuff, and now the MFAs, and… where does it end?
So what I’d want to see, now that I’ve considered it a little better, is a policy that instead of laying out specific departmental or disciplinary exemptions, lays out categories of them. “Directly saleable intellectual property” covers both patents and creative works, no?
(It’d have to be carefully written, though, because the Slumbering Behemoth maintains a fond delusion that academically-published books produce big royalty checks.)
I’m not gonna apologize for wanting to whip up a new scholarly-communication omelette. The current one is burnt crispy and has been left in the pan until it’s green with mold. I don’t necessarily want to break eggs, and this was a good egg to bring up, but I confess I’m getting a sense that my intent is not being honored here, and that bugs me rather.
“Returning to the Slumbering Behemoth, though — it mostly doesn’t have good arguments. It’s just unreasoningly scared, and it’ll seize on any excuse it can find not to change. First I had to exempt the patentable stuff, and now the MFAs, and… where does it end?”
Here’s where it ends: with good education and advocacy from us’n. That’s our job: to persuade and lead people to open access, not to club them into compliance. Most ETD programs wouldn’t survive a legal challenge. It’s like my freshman year, where I had to wear a skirt to dinner: once that policy was lifted, no one wore a skirt, period. The difference is that the world is not harmed if women wear slacks, but the world is indeed harmed if our commitment to open access hinges on mandatory and legally tenuous compliance.
Maybe the Behemoth isn’t all that dumb; maybe it’s not a behemoth at all–just as there is no one librarian–but various communities, ranging from those who need to understand open access and why it benefits the campus, the world, and them, to those who may be fellow travelers but cannot at present compromise their contributions to scholarship through preemptive Web publishing. Some of them may even be publishing on the Web and just want first rights; look at Switchback, the online journal for the MFA program at the University of San Francisco (where I submitted two copies of my thesis on close to a ream of archival paper, as God intended ;> ).
I know at some places the objectors to proposed policies are labeled as merely backward, but that is lumping everyone together quite unfairly. The MFA people might point out some of the faculty who fail to comprehend the objections to Web-uber-alles have limited experience with publishing by traditional means.
Fair enough. It’s frustrating, though, because ETDs are one of the few places we can get enough traction to get something resembling an OA mandate (and I do favor OA mandates, I do!).
Of course, the reason we can get that traction is that the Slumbering Behemoth doesn’t give two hoots about its younglings, and… well, crud. I hate it when my political stances conflict. 🙂
For what it’s worth, Virginia Tech (which is worth looking at in all things ETD; Gail MacMillan rocks my world) has a voluntary-embargo policy. It got heavy use at the start, but then the sky didn’t fall and the world didn’t end and embargoes are now a minimal percentage of deposits.
I can live with that.
I vaguely favored OA mandates in the abstract, without thinking about it too much, until I realized they could possibly apply to *me.*
You’re absolutely right that for 99.9% of deposits, open access will help and not harm. But I’m not as convinced that even disregarding the .01 percent who are greatly affected (probably the same percentage of students affected by curb cuts and accessible library cubicles), mandated open access is philosophically correct or strategically wise.
For one thing, as noted earlier, mandated open access is paternalistic on several levels; it disrespects the student as a participant in the scholarly process, presumes to know what is good for him or her, and claims ownership over a work product that the student paid dearly to produce. For another, mandated open access is a bit lazy. There’s no need to educate scholars about the value of contributing to worldwide scholarship when it’s a forced march. I’ve seen more than one repository where the ONLY significant contributions were mandated ETDs.
MacMillan’s work is great, and I respect her, though some of her writing on ETDs is a bit dismissive of concerns from People Like Me. To those who condescend to scholars and writers struggling to publish in the old-school model, I say spend a while humbling yourself in the submission process and then report back to me. I can live for months on the fumes of a kind and supportive rejection letter, knowing that my work almost made the cut.
kgs:
“the vast majority of scholarly work is not publishable through traditional means and benefits everyone by availability through Web distribution.”
What definition of “not publishable” are we using here: legal barriers to publication, or simply a low likelihood? And what definition of “benefits everyone” are we using? Because I would hate to see an argument that access to literature is not beneficial for individuals or society…
“We’re talking about who gets to decide; we’re talking about honoring diversity with publishing models; we’re debating the issue of who owns the work product. Let’s not pretend this is strictly about furthering the goals of scholarly communication.”
I completely agree. Well, I completely agree with the decision issue and the ownership issue, as matters of ethics and law that urgently need to be addressed. As for honoring diverse publishing models, per Mike and Dorothea, I think that writing departments are no more obligated to defer to publishers’ policies than publishers are to defer to writing departments’ policies. (At the university where I work, at least, deposit policies are developed at the departmental level, not university-wide). Aspiring authors definitely should “vote with their feet” and avoid MFA programs they feel will disadvantage them in their career goals, and MFA programs would be wise to avoid alienating their customer base, but this is a market matter–part of the natural evolution you call for.
“the scholar, not the university, should decide the disposition of his or her work product.”
I agree. However, the interests of faculty scholars and student scholars don’t always match up, as Dorothea notes. In a world where academics commonly list on their CVs the dissertations and theses they have been an advisor for…well, it’s messy. I’m willing to be persuaded that it’s less messy or a different kind of messy for MFA creative theses, but still, a work created in the context of a supervised course of study is generally viewed differently from a work that is independently created. I don’t know that it necessarily *should* be–see above about the decision and ownership issues urgently needing attention–but that’s how things seem to be, and addressing that distinction seems to me to be a necessary part of evaluating ETD policies.
Kgs, I’ll give you the painting example 🙂 When you say that ETD policies are paternalistic, I agree wholeheartedly, but for a different reason: In spite of the movement toward student-centered education, universities are inherently paternalistic. I’m not at all qualified to talk on educational theory, but I personally have no problem with idea that students attend a university to be told what they need to know and how to research.
I would extend this to scholarly communication ideals, and like Dorothea, I fully support OA mandates. That a student’s thesis is their wholly-owned “work product” bothers me for the same reason as does our university’s “Office of Commercialization”: the university is not a for-profit corporation, and it should not be run like one. Now if you’ll excuse me, there are some other windmills that require my attention!
In all seriousness, though, I can’t imagine that ETD copies would in any way depress the future sales of professionally typset and edited editions. Similarly, as Dorothea said, the royalty checks from almost any academic work are most likely a paltry sum. Tell the students to give a little something back to the community from which they so heavily borrowed to get their degree (fair use? academic library collections?) before they rush headlong into corporate America.
Mark, I would say “Walk a mile in my shoes,” except that if you’ve been reading this blog you know that my feet are approximately a men’s size four, which would probably be quite painful for you.
By “not publishable,” I mean the scholarly efforts that haven’t got a snowball’s chance of hell in their present form of being accepted for traditional publication, and usually aren’t intended for those avenues anyway. It’s no poor reflection on this scholarship that you’re not going to buy it on Amazon. That’s the really positive side of all this repository work: a home for all this (mostly) excellent grey literature. The negatives come when harsh mandates and coercion (some of it justified by hifalutin gobbleygook about being Here to Help) replace education and persuasion. If open access is such a great idea, then sell it, don’t tell it.
In creative writing, the “work product created in a supervised course of study” is a guided/mentored/workshopped product that is overwhelmingly (for better or worse) the student’s creative effort. He or she paid for the right to have professional instruction for how to create a viable work product, but it is still his or her independent effort. I would be thrilled if my advisors listed my thesis on their C.V.s, and indeed whenever I or someone else has a piece accepted, the school is careful to announce it in their weekly newsletter, as part of the body of evidence for the work the school produces… much as a student who publishes in ITAL no doubt gets noticed by his or her library school for meeting that particular bar.
kgs: happily, reading your blog not only informs me about your shoe size, but also allows me to walk, okay, not a *mile*, but a couple hundred yards in your shoes. Which is very valuable.
I think a sticking point in your clarification of “not publishable” is “in their present form,” which would seem to exclude from consideration dissertations that have been revised into published books, which is the hope of many a tenure-seeking academic. (Like my brother did, yay him! And one can buy his book on Amazon.) I’m not sure that’s a fair or valid exclusion, but that’s probably getting away from the main point at hand.
I think at this point I’m going to send this post/comments to the relevant people involved in setting the writing department’s ETD policy. They’re ultimately in a better position to judge what’s best practices in their field than I am. Thanks again for the thought-provoking!
“In all seriousness, though, I can’t imagine that ETD copies would in any way depress the future sales of professionally typset and edited editions. Similarly, as Dorothea said, the royalty checks from almost any academic work are most likely a paltry sum. Tell the students to give a little something back to the community from which they so heavily borrowed to get their degree (fair use? academic library collections?) before they rush headlong into corporate America.”
This is laden with assumptions. First, as any literary writer knows, with very few exceptions, prepublishing kills a work’s chance in the literary publishing market. The article in the March/April issue of “Poets and Writers” cites journals that make that clear.
Second, it doesn’t matter how much the scholar is paid for the work. That is not the point. Most literary journals are operating on slim margins, and writers understand that the pay is nominal, particularly if you factor in the actual time spent.
Third, the idea that writers are rushing into corporate America is laughable. I write so I can live; my literary writing keeps me sane. I hold down a day job (well… maybe not not right now…) as a compromise.
A scholar who willingly contributes to the literary tradition, knowing he or she will be lucky to publish an essay a year, sharing his or her knowledge with others (as so many writers do), and keeping our culture’s literary flame alive, is someone to be honored, not scolded.
Mark, thanks. If there is one rule that applies here, it has to do with consistency and hobgoblins and whatnot. A little tender mercy for the creative writing types would be greatly appreciated.
Karen, why do you THINK repositories have nothing but ETDs in them? Because the Slumbering Behemoth won’t do a single thing it doesn’t have to, even when that thing is neutral or even advantageous to them, to their institution, to their discipline, or to society at large.
That is why I support mandates. We’ve gone the reasonable-persuasion route. It. Does. Not. Work. Not even a little bit. So as a matter of mere practicality, we have to do something else.
In point of fact I think funders are going to press this issue faster and harder than libraries or institutions. That doesn’t mean I think libraries and institutions should sit back and wait for funders, though, because I don’t.
…prepublishing kills a work’s chance in the literary publishing market.
I don’t think we should base our ETD policies on the business decisions of the publishing industry. As Mark said, if this approach is wrong, MFA students can vote with their feet and universities can reassess.
Also, I’m not out to deprive any author of the ability to publish and be compensated for their work. But really, if librarians won’t stand up to the copyright-maximalist policies of the publishing industry, then who will? The first sale doctrine already allows library users access to books at a fraction of the purchase price. Maybe it’s a pinko scheme, but it’s what we do. Would anyone argue that society is NOT improved by “underpriced” access to information?
Lastly,
…hifalutin gobbleygook about being Here to Help
That would be what drew me to this profession.
Dorothea, I’ve seen faculty willingly participate in various repositories, from disciplinary repositories to the content section of Blackboard–the latter being a fascinating example of faculty inventing their repository space from the ground up, without realizing that is what they are doing.
One of the areas of confusion I have identified in IR discussions is the distinction between compliance and effort. Make it easy on them. Make the tools work with their workflow. Take a page from 2.0 theory and make it pleasant, even fun. People will gladly do easy things that benefit them.
I still feel very uneasy with the tone of your comment. “The faculty will not obey us, so we will club them into submission.” That’s not paternalism… that’s Franco!
I look forward to the debate heating up–I’ll have my boxing shorts on.
“hifalutin gobbleygook about being Here to Help …That would be what drew me to this profession.”
Yeah, me too, except there’s helpful, and then there’s “We’re Just Here To Help,” which is code-language for the big hammer dropping on your head.
“I don’t think we should base our ETD policies on the business decisions of the publishing industry. As Mark said, if this approach is wrong, MFA students can vote with their feet and universities can reassess.”
They can also vote with their lawyers. I guess I’m surprised at your inflexibility; you’re engineering a discipline’s publishing model, not supporting their scholarly efforts. On whose behalf are you inflicting all these decisions? Not the scholar’s. Like I said, Just Here To Help.
I’m inflexible because I see this as an unwelcome intrusion by the publishing industry on academia. It’s as if they said to the authors, “If you want your paper to go anywhere, make sure it stays out of that institutional repository.” We wouldn’t be discussing repositories if the commercial publishing market was adequate for the information sharing and storage needs of academia.
On whose behalf am I inflicting these desicions? On the behalf of our users, who would like to access the work of a scholar. I’ve been in the position of saying to a patron “Sorry, there’s one copy of that item across the country, and that library won’t lend their hard copy.” If the thesis was available electronically, AND a publisher could find it in their heart to publish an edited copy as well, wouldn’t this we the ideal situation? That’s all I’m looking for.
First, in literary circles, we don’t call our work “papers.” Essays, poetry, reviews, stories, travelogues, portraits, works, billet-doux… but please don’t call them “papers.”
Most literary journals have reasonably-priced subscription models putting them well in reach of most large institutions. I just finished reading The Missouri Review and The Antioch Review while treadmilling at the Y (I cheated, and only read the essays–I admit it, I’m a genre chauvinist). The Antioch Review is $40 a year; the Missouri Review is $24 a year ($48 for three years right now, if you hurry). These are typical (maybe even high) subscription prices.
Naturally, there are evil, grasping publishers, and we know who they are and how they operate. But would you say that of The Sun? Creative Nonfiction? Ploughshares? Pleiades? River Teeth? The Colorado Review? The Alaska Quarterly? n+1? Gastronomica? Ascent? Calyx? Lilith? Zyzzyva? Go browse http://newpages.com to become better acquainted with the journals I’m talking about. These publications aren’t getting rich.
The ideal situation would be if librarians backed off from trying to reengineer publishing models in the humanities on behalf of rigid models of repositories (fueled, I am afraid, by competition among some institutions for the highest IR “body count”) and focused instead on supporting both writers and users across a wide spectrum of possibilities. It will be a sad day if writers end up fearing and battling librarians over something as fundamental as the right to choose when and where a work is published.
In our experience with IRs, we’ve found that they *do* work if your style works well with the style of the folks in the applicable departmental unit. As kgs points out, and as we’ve discovered ourselves, that style varies widely from discipline to discipline. So that’s often meant that our “style” has to adapt to fit.
We’re coming up on 2000 free items in our IR from various departments (our front-page count says over 8000, but 6000 of these are for-pay theses that Proquest dumps in), and are processing new items as fast as we can. Departments like computer science jumped in with both feet, and are not only putting in new stuff, but they’re paying for a project to digitize their backfiles of technical reports back to the 1960s to put into the IR. Other departments have been slower to get enthusiastic, but often warm up to it if we make it easy for their papers to go in, especially when (as occasionally happens) some paper or series they’ve put in the IR gets famous online or offline somehow.
We’ve had to approach different departments and schools differently, though. For example, computer science wants all its backfiles in its departmental collection, but some humanities departments aren’t keen on having scholarship by people no longer in the department remain associated with the department, (And we, looking at it like an archive, want to keep it available for access in any case.) But there are various ways around those issues, such as moving things to another “historical archives” kind of section if the originally sponsoring department doesn’t want to be closely associated with it any more.
Two note: if you’re serious about pulling a lot of things into your IR, you have to be willing to pay for the requisite staffing. (We have a full-time paper-puller-inner, along with our various subject liaisons. And even then, if a unit like our school of medicine decided to jump on the bnadwagon, we’d be seriously beyond-swamped.)
And we’re still a long way from covering the whole institution with our unit-by-unit approach. But the units we *do* have are generally well engaged, and the units that are in start to to attack other units that want to be in too. If we’ve got good OA coverage even for just some of the fields we collect in, that’s a good start, and better in my mind that fair or poor OA coverage for a wider range of fields.
Okay, here is where I’m getting confused about the argument for the exceptionalism of creative theses…In doing research on this, I’ve come across that some universities require that master’s theses and PhD dissertations be published through UMI. The information about the process seems pretty constant across institutions (e.g., West Virginia University and University of Arkansas). Leaving aside for the moment the questions of open access being mandatory or optional (with UMI, it’s optional), I am sincerely wondering why literary works are treated differently by publishers than academic works. Under “Effects of publishing your content elsewhere” (p. IX), UMI’s material says:
“In most cases, you will not be submitting your dissertation or thesis as is…Most often, the content submitted for journal publication is an excerpt, chapter, or section of your dissertation or thesis…The content is likely to be rearranged and reformatted to fit the style of the journal to which you submit. Finally, the content is likely to be revised and updated through…the editorial process if it is accepted. All of these processes mean that the material as finally published by a journal is substantively and substantially refined and therefore different from the content that is published as your dissertation or thesis. For this reason, journals are not historically concerned about your content having appeared and been distributed as a published graduate work.”
In the Politics, Technology and Language post referenced above, the author refers to “submitting chapters from our theses, or variations of them, to literary and commercial magazines.”
Question 1: Is the editorial process so minimal in literary and commercial magazines, compared to academic journals, that it is reasonable to consider these chapters as essentially unchanged in content when they become essays etc.?
Returning to UMI:
“Academic presses, monograph publishers, and commercial presses are more likely to consider your dissertation or thesis as a book. Still…the editorial process that turns your graduate work into a book is likely to change it substantially. Historically, presses have not been terribly concerned that distribution of your graduate work would harm potential sales as a book. However, as dissertations and theses have become widely available over the internet through libraries, consortia and institutional repositories as well as from our subscription database, more presses may look more carefully at the question of marketability.”
Question 2: If publishers across all fields may be looking more carefully at the question of marketability, is it fair to single out creative works for special protection in ETD policies? Put another way: Outside of the issue of publicly funded research, is it fair for institutions to reengineer STM or social science publishing if it is unfair for them to reengineer humanities publishing?
Or, to put it more bluntly, in response to this quote from Beth Kaufka and Jennifer Bryan’s Poets & Writers article: “Other disciplines work toward the dissemination of knowledge and greater research possibilities, writers produce artwork.” Isn’t this demeaning to the creativity and beauty of the work of non-literary writers, as well as dismissive of the inspirational/intellectual value of reading and studying literature for literary scholars and writers?
I accept that, in the field of literary publishing, publishers are sticklers about previous publication; I have no reason to discount what people more experienced than me in that field are saying about the realities of trying to get their work published. (I also accept that UMI, out of self-interest, could have edited its explanatory material with a rose-colored pen). But still, I am not yet seeing where that stickler-ness is based on anything distinctive about the nature of the work product.
As a librarian, I am happy to leave decisions about open access and publishing models to the people producing the work–but that is only because, perhaps uncharacteristically as a librarian, I also don’t lose much sleep when requested or desirable services can’t be done with provided funding. ksg states: “Most literary journals have reasonably-priced subscription models putting them well in reach of most large institutions.” Well, all the institutions that I’ve worked at have been tiny to small. At my current place of work, I went to read the Poets & Writers article reference above, and I couldn’t because that was one of the titles dropped by my predecessor during the most recent budget crisis. (True!) Add subscription literary magazines in any non-trivial number? Not an option here, and I imagine it’s not an option for the statistical majority of libraries, especially public ones.
“Question 1: Is the editorial process so minimal in literary and commercial magazines, compared to academic journals, that it is reasonable to consider these chapters as essentially unchanged in content when they become essays etc.?”
Good grief, yes. It’s a different world. Editing for non-literary journals is designed to get the writing out of the way of the content. For literary journals, the writing *is* the content.
A book-length literary work may get a lot of attention from an editor. But for the short piece, it better be essentially a few fillips or tweaks. Presumably the piece has been through a fairly rigorous editorial process by the time it has been submitted, either by the lone author plugging through the revision process or, if the writer is inclined to do this, through informal review with peers. Literary journals get thousands of submissions annually; assuming they even bother with the slush pile (me at prayer: please bother please bother please bother…), your piece better be stand-out amazing. The tweaks I had for an essay accepted for publication were so few in number and minor in character (and so in keeping with my style) that had I not known the piece was being edited, I would not have noticed.
“Question 2: If publishers across all fields may be looking more carefully at the question of marketability, is it fair to single out creative works for special protection in ETD policies? Put another way: Outside of the issue of publicly funded research, is it fair for institutions to reengineer STM or social science publishing if it is unfair for them to reengineer humanities publishing?”
If this was strictly about fairness, all ETD policies would be opt-in for open Web access, rather than a forced march to OA; I repeat my earlier point that decisions about the work product should be made by the scholar, not the institution. However, if the STM departments can live with open access as the default–I’m assuming they aren’t complaining; in which case, they have essentially opted-in en masse–then the question becomes, can you design a policy that is fair as possible to a wide range of participants? This is about policy in the real world, versus policy in the abstract.
On the issue of the articles not available at your institution, first, there is the option of interlibrary loan, and second, some journals are indexed in online databases, and third–third is that the two statements do not follow rhetorically. It is muddled to state that your institution doesn’t have access to some journals, ergo, open access. Poets and Writers isn’t available at the nearest ARL or at our local public library, but it just doesn’t follow that my inconvenience is well-served by compelling scholars to place their work products on the open Web. That’s like saying that I forgot to bring my money so it’s perfectly all right to filch those porterhouse steaks I saw at Publix. My cats reason that way, but I don’t.
Thanks for the clarification about literary editing. It is helpful.
“It is muddled to state that your institution doesn’t have access to some journals, ergo, open access.”
Which is not what I stated: My statement was that to say “subscriptions are reasonably priced, therefore access is not an issue” is muddled.
“it just doesn’t follow that my inconvenience is well-served by compelling scholars to place their work products on the open Web.”
I agree that this is not necessarily the case, which is why I said that I was leaving aside the question of *mandated* open access for the moment, in order to get a better understanding of differences in publishing models.
“That’s like saying that I forgot to bring my money so it’s perfectly all right to filch those porterhouse steaks I saw at Publix.”
Um, no, it isn’t at all. The open access argument is more like saying that it’s all right for Publix to say that if you choose to learn how to cook porterhouse steaks there, you have to let them give them away your evidence-of-learning steak for free. I think the key dispute is whether such an agreement is equivalent to Publix saying that you have to offer those steaks for free ever after or not, making it so that no other restaurant will hire you. Which in practice, as current literary publishing practices stand, seems to be the case.
But no, I don’t find the mandated open-access argument persuasive enough at this point, with the exception of publicly funded research.
As a parenthetical aside on the sufficiency of interlibrary loan for ensuring access to the content of journals, the CONTU guidelines have this to say:
“‘aggregate quantities as to substitute for a subscription to or purchase of such work’ shall mean…with respect to any given periodical (as opposed to any given issue of a periodical), filled requests of a library or archives (a ‘requesting entity’) within any calendar year for a total of six or more copies of an article or articles published in such periodical within five years prior to the date of the request.”
In the case of Poets & Writers, then, that would mean if six other users had already asked for articles from that magazine, or one other user had asked for six articles from it, or any other combination of users and articles adding up to six–well, then no, I couldn’t use the ILL service at my library to get access to the ETD article. Alternatively, I could wait until 2008.
Six articles really doesn’t go very far, from an access point of view.
N.B., caveat, disclaimer, etc.: I’m still not in favor of mandated open access.
(if six other users had already asked for articles from that magazine*
*from issues published in the past five years)
Well, among other things, let’s start with how crazy it is that I can’t put my hands on the most recent back issue of Poets and Writers at a local academic or public library. I mean, this is Tallahassee, not Radio-Free Europe. I realize I can’t get real Mexican food in this town, or a decent bowl of pho, and I am willing to live with that (we do have great oysters). But what is it with Florida and the humanities? We have one of the better MFA programs in the country right here in this town, and just try to find any of the journals I mentioned.
Moving back to open access, I’ll assert: maybe some disciplines don’t mind handing over their grey literature to a public archive. I blog into a public archive (the Web). But I want to make that call. Whose thesis is it, anyway? So we are on the same page. I’m just watching out for my literary peeps, not with any special rationale other than few others will.
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