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Sunday, July 20, 2008

Ownership rights

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about Gerard Jones' wonderful book called Men of Tomorrow, which is a history of comic books' "golden age." Don't worry--I'm not going to re-review it. The book did get me thinking about another type of publishing, though--academic journal publishing--and the issue of ownership rights to one's work. That's what I want to reflect on here.

As Jones shows, the comic book industry's "golden age" (roughly 1938-1960) really wasn't all that golden, especially when you look at things from the standpoint of labor. Writers and artists were largely considered to be hacks by comic book publishers, and with rare exceptions, most were paid a pittance. There were a few star writers and artists, of course--people like Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and Batman creator Bob Kane. But stars or not, comic book writers and artists were almost universally compelled to sign away the rights to their words, illustrations, and characters to the publishers who employed them. (Kane was an exception, but only because of a legal loophole.) That was a basic condition of their employment and of the system writ large. Most sufferred terribly a a result. What's all the more shameful is that comic book publishers often claimed to be making little or no money off of the writers' and artists' work when, in fact, they were profiting handsomely from it.

There seem to me some rough parallels between the "golden age" of comic books and contempory academic journal publishing. Most significant here is the issue of ownership rights to one's work. Nearly all journal publishing contracts stipulate that authors must transfer copyright and other entitlements to the publishers of our articles. We retain some rights, of course, including (thankfully) the right to be identified as the author of the work. We're also typically allowed to re-use material from our published articles in whatever books we may write, although generally our doing so requires asking for the journal publishers' permission. But otherwise, like the writers and artists of comic books' golden age, publication of our journal articles is contingent on publishers stripping us of most of the rights to our creative work.

Now, the old saw usually goes something like this: academic publishing is the pecuniary backwater of the publishing industry. Consequently, scholars must grant journal publishers exclusive rights to publish, license, and otherwise commercially exploit our work. Otherwise, the latter would be unable to cover production costs, must less hope to turn a profit.

This may be true where the journals in question are published by not-for-profit university presses. It's not the case, however, for large, for-profit journal publishers. Consider this: Taylor & Franics/Informa's revenue topped £1.1 billion GBP in 2007, an increase of 9% over the preceding year. John Wiley & Sons 2007 merger with Blackwell was a US$1 billion deal. The proposed merger of journal giants Reed Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer (now Cinven), in 1997/19998, would have been a US$9 billion deal had it gone through. These companies and others like them are hardly straped for cash.

So what might we do to improve the situation for academic authors? We might take a cue from the comic book industry. In the 1990s, star writers and illustrators such as Todd McFarlane stopped working for Marvel and DC, the industry majors, and began their own lines. Significantly, they allowed those in their emply to retain rights to the words, pictures, and characters they created. This totally transformed the industry. The new companies almost immediately siphoned off the best talent from Marvel and DC, who were then forced to offer similar deals to writers and artists in order to remain competitive.

I wonder: is something similar possible in academic journal publishing? Is there a way to allow authors to retain most rights to our published work, and perhaps even to profit directly from it? If we could create a journal like that--a successful one--might it not compel the large journal publishers to follow? These are questions I'll consider in a future blog post.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's a good question, Ted, but we have to deal with who owns the means of production. One can start an online journal, I suppose, as performance studies folk did with +liminalities+ . . . and so far that journal has been fairly successful. But, of course, not with the kind of influence that McFarlane had.

It seems to me the coin of the realm here is print, and glossy print at that. Victor Vitanza tried a similar thing with PRE/Text, which he insists isn't dead yet but which has been on hiatus for many years. So how does one create a print journal that can have staying power as an indie?

I can think of only one example: Telos. It has also seemed to be on the decline since Piccone's death.

Ultimately, though, one would battle the Wall of Sheer Exhaustion (WOSE) trying to get such a thing started. Without the security of tenure, trying to break off into a self-owned venture while publishing in sanctioned, peer review journals would destroy most of us, and most assuredly those of us with burgeoning families.

Meanwhile: Taylor & Francis out to be named Paylor & Fascist. I have oh so many stories about how NCA's Faustian bargain has sucked our collective souls into the anus of bullshittery . . . .

Ted Striphas said...

Hey Josh,

Thank for the comment--and especially for all the information on indie journals. You're absolutely right on in saying how the realities of tenure and promotion complicate indie journal production. You're also on the mark in pointing out how academics--especially those in the humanities--continue to fetishize print.

Maybe it's naive of me, but those seem to me like "constraints" in the good 'ole rhetorical sense of the word. That is, they're both limitations and creative opportunities.

It seems to me like change would have to be twofold (at minimum). First, the humanities needs its Todd McFarlane, someone with sufficient star power to attract people to an Indie journal (and preferably someone who left the editorship of a major corporate journal to do so). Second, any journal would need to be produced both in print and online--which is viable given on-demand printing services such as Lulu and others. Of course, distribution still remains an issue.

No easy solutions, but I'm still optimistic that change can and will come. Explicitly or not, most everyone in the humanities seems to recognize the system is broken. Now if only we could get enough folks together to fix the darn thing.

Jason Mittell said...

Ted,

An additional constraint that I've run across in my explorations of this issue: some journals function to provide economic support for scholarly societies. For instance, Cinema Journal provides income to SCMS through institutional subscriptions and Project Muse - if it went to open access (which many members would prefer), SCMS would lose much-needed revenue.

This doesn't preclude DIY efforts, but the institutional benefits of some journals to the infrastructure of scholarly societies will prevent a wholesale shift to open access.

Kevin Hawkins said...

SPARC, and its allied efforts around the world, are trying to effect such change in the world of scholarly publishing. SPARC is very good at creating business models that allow the content to be available for free (open access) and allow authors to retain more rights to their content than allowed by traditional publishers. There is a wide range of such publishing efforts already underway, from "start-ups" like bepress and Hindawi to library-based publishers, like the Scholarly Publishing Office at the University of Michigan (where I work) to efforts coming directly from scholarly societies (none come to mind at the moment). For more, see Create Change.