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.

*from issues published in the past five years)

“‘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.

“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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.