Ambivalently Scribd

Back in March I announced on my other blog that The Late Age of Print was available on the document sharing site, Scribd. I was excited to see it there for many reasons, chief among them the Creative Commons license I'd negotiated with my publisher, Columbia University Press, which provides for the free circulation and transformation of the electronic edition of Late Age. The book's presence on Scribd was, for me, evidence of the CC license really working. I was also excited by Scribd's mobile features, which meant, at least in theory, that the e-book version of Late Age might enjoy some uptake on one or more of the popular e-reading systems I often write about here.

Lately, though, I'm beginning to feel less comfortable with the book's presence there. Scribd has grown and transformed considerably since March, adding all sorts of features to make the site more sticky -- things like commenting, social networking, an improved interface, and more. These I like, but there's one new feature I'm not feeling: ads by Google. Here's a screenshot from today, showing what The Late Age of Print looks like on Scribd.

Note the ad in the bottom-right portion of the screen for a book called, Aim High! 101 Tips for Teens, available on Amazon.com. (Clearly, somebody at Google/Scribd needs to work on their cross-promotions.) You can subscribe to an ad-free version of Scribd for $2.99/month or $29.99/year.

Now, I'm not one of those people who believes that all advertising is evil. Some advertising I find quite helpful. Moreover, on feature-rich sites like Scribd (and in newspapers and magazines, on TV, etc.), it's what subsidizes the cost of my own and others' "free" experience.

Here's the problem, though. The Creative Commons license under which the e-edition of Late Age was issued says this:

This PDF is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License, available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or by mail from Creative Commons, 171 Second St., Suite 300, San Francisco, CA 94105 U.S.A.

“Noncommercial” as defined in this license specifically excludes any sale of this work or any portion thereof for money, even if the sale does not result in a profit by the seller or if the sale is by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit or NGO.

I'm pretty sure the presence of advertising on Scribd violates the terms of the license, albeit in an indirect way. It's not like Late Age is being sold there for money. However, it does provide a context or occasion for the selling of audience attention to advertisers, as well as the selling of an ad-free experience to potential readers. Either way, it would seem as though the book has become a prompt for commercial transactions.

As of today, the site has recorded close to 2,000 "reads" of Late Age (whatever that means), which would indicate that Scribd has managed to reach a small yet significant group of people by piggybacking on my book.

Honestly, I'm not sure what to do about this.

In software terms I've always considered the e-edition of Late Age to be more like shareware than freeware. That is, my publisher and I are comfortable with some folks free-riding provided that others -- hopefully many others -- go on to purchase the printed edition of the book. The e-edition is not, in other words, a total freebie. Columbia has invested significant time, money, and energy in producing the book, and if nothing else the Press deserves to recoup its investment. Me? I'm more interested in seeing the arguments and ideas spread, but not at the cost of Columbia losing money on the project.

In any case, the situation with advertising on Scribd raises all sorts of vexing questions about what counts as a "commercial" or "non-commercial" use of a book in the late age of print. This became clear to me after finishing Chris Kelty's Two Bits: The Cultural Politics of Free Software (Duke U.P., 2008). Kelty discusses how changes in technology, law, and structures of power and authority have created a host of issues for people in and beyond the world of software to work through: can free software still be free if it's built on top of commercial applications, even in part? can collectively-produced software be copyrighted, and if so, by whom? should a single person profit from the sale of software that others have helped to create? and so on.

Analogously, can the use of an e-book to lure eyeballs, and thus ad dollars, be considered "non-commercial?" What about using the volume to market an ad-free experience? More broadly, how do you define the scope of "non-commercial" once book content begins to migrate across diverse digital platforms? I don't have good answers to any of these questions, although to the first two I intuitively want to say, "no." Then again, I'm pretty sure we're dealing with an issue that's never presented itself in quite this way before, at least in the book world. Consequently, I'll refrain from making any snap-judgments.

As I've said here before, though, I recently ported The Differences and Repetitions Wiki from Wikidot to its own independent site after Wikidot became inundated with advertising. In general I'm not a fan of my work being used to sell lots of other, unrelated stuff, especially when there are more traditionally non-commercial options available for getting the work out.

Feedback, Please!

Earlier this summer Desiree Rowe and Ben Myers, whose podcast The Critical Lede I cannot say enough good things about, invited me to contribute to a journal forum they're editing on "The Performative Possibilities of New Media." Given my interest in the politics of scholarly communication, I immediately jumped at the chance to participate.

Composing the essay took a little longer than I'd expected, but I think I've got a respectable version of the piece now in hand. It's called "Performing Scholarly Communication," and it reflects on the origins and possible futures of academic periodical publishing.

This is where you come in. I've posted the draft essay to one of my project sites, The Differences & Repetitions Wiki (a.k.a., D&R^W), in the hopes those of you reading this might be kind enough to offer some feedback. You'll find "Performing Scholarly Communication" on the site, along with other essays I've worked on over the years.  Don't hesitate to comment anonymously -- I'm completely cool with that -- and definitely take some time to poke around a bit.  Oh, and by the way, the piece is pretty short, so it won't take you very long to read.

I mentioned back in July that I'd be rebooting D&R^W, mainly as a result of the influx of advertising appearing on the original host site, Wikidot.  Well, this is it.  "Performing Scholarly Communication" marks the (dant-dant-daah!) GRAND OPENING of the new D&R^W, which links directly off of this blog.  Enjoy.

Thanks in advance, wise crowd, for reading and commenting on the draft of my piece. I hope you find something in there that intrigues you.

Scholarly Journal Publishing

My latest essay, "Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Academic Journal Publishing," is now out in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7(1) (March 2010), pp. 3-25. In my opinion, it's probably the single most important journal essay I've published to date. Here's the abstract:

This essay explores the changing context of academic journal publishing and cultural studies' envelopment within it. It does so by exploring five major trends affecting scholarly communication today: alienation, proliferation, consolidation, pricing, and digitization. More specifically, it investigates how recent changes in the political economy of academic journal publishing have impinged on cultural studies' capacity to transmit the knowledge it produces, thereby dampening the field's political potential. It also reflects on how cultural studies' alienation from the conditions of its production has resulted in the field's growing involvement with interests that are at odds with its political proclivities.

Keywords: Cultural Studies; Journal Publishing; Copyright; Open Access; Scholarly Communication

I'm fortunate to have already had the published essay reviewed by Ben Myers and Desiree Rowe, who podcast over at The Critical Lede. You can listen to their thoughtful commentary on "Acknowledged Goods" by clicking here -- and be sure to check out their other podcasts while you're at it!

Since I'm on the topic of the politics of academic knowledge, I'd be remiss not to mention Siva Vaidhyanathan's amazing piece from the 2009 NEA Almanac of Higher Education, which recently came to my attention courtesy of Michael Zimmer. It's called "The Googlization of Universities." I found Siva's s discussion of bibliometrics -- the measurement of bibliographic citations and journal impact -- to be particularly intriguing. I wasn't aware that Google's PageRank system essentially took its cue from that particular corner of the mathematical universe. The piece also got me thinking more about the idea of "algorithmic culture," which I've blogged about here from time to time and that I hope to expand upon in an essay.

Please shoot me an email if you'd like a copy of "Acknowledged Goods." Of course, I'd be welcome any feedback you may have about the piece, either here or elsewhere.

The Late Age of Print open source audiobook project

Listening to Chris Anderson's Free: The Future of a Radical Price on a long car trip got me thinking: why not make an audiobook out of my own book, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control? And why not, like Anderson, give the digital recording away for free? The thought had barely crossed my mind when reality started to sink in. "You're no Chris Anderson," I told myself. "You don't have the time or the resources to make an audiobook out of Late Age. Just forget about it."

Well, I didn't forget about it. I figured if I couldn't make an audiobook myself, then I'd do the next best thing: let the computer do it for me, using a text-to-speech (T-T-S) synthesizer. The more I thought about the project, the more convinced I became that it was a good idea. It wouldn't just be cool to be able to listen to Late Age on an iPod; an audio edition would finally make the book accessible to vision impaired people, too.

And so I got down to work. I extracted all of the text from the free, Creative Commons-licensed PDF of Late Age and proceeded to text-to-speech-ify it, one chapter at a time. I played back my first recording -- the Introduction -- but it was disaster! The raw text had all sorts of remnants from the original book layout (footnotes, page headers/numbers, words hyphenated due to line breaks, and whole lot more). They seriously messed up the recording, and so I knew they needed to go. I began combing through the text, only to discover that the cleanup would take me, working alone, many more hours than I could spare, especially with a newborn baby in my life. Frustrated, I nearly abandoned the project for a second time.

Then it dawned on me: if I'm planning on giving away the audiobook for free, then why not get people who might be interested in hearing Late Age in on it, too? Thus was born the Late Age of Print wiki, the host site for The Late Age of Print open source audiobook project. The plan is for all of us, using the wiki, to create a Creative Commons-licensed text-to-speech version of the book, which will be available for free online.

There's a good deal of work for us to do, but don't be daunted! If you choose to donate a large chunk of your time to help out the cause, then that's just super. But don't forget that projects like this one also succeed when a large number of people invest tiny amounts of their time as well. Your five or ten minutes of editing, combined with the work of scores of other collaborators, will yield a top-notch product in the end. I've posted some guidelines on the wiki site to help get you started.

I doubt that I have a large enough network of my own to pull off this project, so if your blog, Tweet, contribute to listservs, or otherwise maintain a presence online, please, please, please spread the word!

Thank you in advance for your contributions, whatever they may be. In the meantime, if you have any questions about The Late Age of Print open source audiobook project, don't hesitate to email me. I'd love to hear from you!

Cultural Studies Review goes open access

D&R readers in North America may not be familiar with Cultural Studies Review (neé The UTS Review [1995-2002]), but it's one of the most innovative cultural studies journals around. Now it gets even better: CSR has gone open-access, with all of the journal's content freely available online. Definitely check out the current issue and, while you're at it, why not troll through the archive?

---

Cultural Studies Review 16.1 (March 2010)
Special Issue: Rural Cultural Studies: Research, Practice, Ethics

edited by John Frow and Katrina Schlunke
co-edited with with Clifton Evers, Andrew Gorman-Murray and Emily Potter

SPECIAL ISSUE CONTENTS:

• John Frow and Katrina Schlunke, Editorial, "Rural Cultural Studies"
• Clifton Evers, Andrew Gorman-Murray and Emily Potter, ‘Introduction: Doing Rural Cultural Studies’
• Lisa Slater, ‘Who Do I Serve?’
• Emily Potter, ‘The Ethics of Rural Place-Making: Public Space, Poetics, and the Ontologies of Design’
• Rob Garbutt, ‘The Clearing: Heidegger’s Lichtung and The Big Scrub’
• Michelle Duffy, ‘Sound Ecologies’
• Andrew Gorman-Murray, ‘An Australian Feeling for Snow: Towards Understanding Cultural and Emotional Dimensions of Climate Change’
• Deb Anderson, ‘Drought, Endurance and Climate Change “Pioneers”: Lived Experience in the Production of Rural Environmental Knowledge’
• Michelle Dicinoski, Poems: 'Weights' and 'Measures'
• Kim Satchell, ‘Auto-choreography: Animating Sentient Archives’
• Tanya J. King, ‘Damming the Flow: Cultural Barriers to Perceived Procedural Justice‚ in Wonthaggi, Victoria’
• Rae Dufty, ‘Reflecting on Power Relationships in the 'Doing' of Rural Cultural Research’
• Lisa Slater, ‘“Calling our Spirits Home”: Indigenous Cultural Festivals and the Making of a Good Life’
• Melissa Gregg, ‘Available in Selected Metros Only: Rural Melancholy and the Promise of Online Connectivity’
• Ross Gibson, ‘Intimacy’

POETRY:

• Ouyang Yu, Four Poems: ‘Bad Blurbs’, ‘2009’, ‘“Australia”’‚ and ‘World Atlas: A Random Fragmentary Selection’
• Pam Brown, ‘Windows Wound Down’

ARTICLES:

• Ann Game and Andrew Metcalfe, ‘Presence of the Gift’
• Katelyn Barney, ‘Gendering Aboriginalism: A Performative Gaze on Indigenous Australian Women’
• Sarah Gillman, ‘Heroes, Mates and Family: How Tragedy Teaches Us About Being Australian’

REVIEWS:

• Margaret Henderson on Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change
• Adrian Martin on Stuart Cunningham, In the Vernacular: A Generation of Culture and Controversy
• Deane Williams on Ross Gibson, The Summer Exercises
• Dimitris Vardoulakis on Nick Mansfield, Theorizing War: From Hobbes to Badiou
• Sarah Cefai on Samantha Holland (ed.), Remote Relationships in a Small World

ABOUT THE JOURNAL:
Cultural Studies Review is a peer-refereed open-access e-journal published twice a year (in March and September) by UTSePress. This is the journal's first issue as a purely on-line publication. You can view the journal here: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/csrj. Access is free, but you do need to register. Once you have done this, you can read the current issues, receive publication alerts for all future issues, submit articles for consideration on-line and, if you are willing, record your research interests for our referee database.

Register now, and keep up to date with the latest high-quality research and innovative writing in the realm of cultural studies. Queries: csreview@unimelb.edu.au

Differences & Repetions -- the wiki

Because I know blog readership has a tendency to ebb and wane, I thought I'd remind all of you about this site's companion, the Differences and Repetitions Wiki. I also have an exciting announcement to share.

I launched D&R^W back in November 2007, initially as an experiment in collaborative and distributed or "rhizomatic" writing -- and antidote, I'd hoped, to the traditional, closed model of writing in the humanities. The first project, which is still active, began with an essay I drafted for a meeting of the National Communication Association. It explicates Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's enigmatic statement from their book, What is Philosophy?: "“We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present.” Rather than letting myself have the final word, I decided to make it an open and ever-evolving project; anyone who wants to edit, add to, or otherwise improve upon the piece is welcome to do so, along the lines of Wikipedia.

Currently there are two more projects hosted on D&R^W: my piece on cultural studies and the politics of academic journal publishing, a slightly revised version of which should be appearing imminently in the journal, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies; and my essay on audience labor and the Amazon Kindle e-reader. Although neither piece is set up for public editing, anyone is welcome to leave comments, questions, or feedback on the project site -- anonymous or otherwise.

More than two years after launching the D&R Wiki, I'm happy to report that "We Do Not Lack Communication" continues to evolve. A pretty robust dialogue has also cropped up around early fragments of the journal publishing and Kindle essays, which I'd be delighted to see multiply on the fuller versions. Of course, this is all thanks to the many contributions of the D&R community. Please keep them coming!

It's pretty clear to me that there many more possibilities for engagement on D&R^W, compared to your run-of-the-mill academic journal. And so finally, the big announcement: if YOU have a writing project that would (a) be of interest to readers of this blog and that (b) you'd like to see hosted on D&R^W, send me an email inquiry. Let's open this thing up even more!

Going mobile

Great news! A good Samaritan, whose handle is "creiercret," recently uploaded the free, Creative Commons-licensed PDF of The Late Age of Print onto the document sharing site, Scribd. Here's the link to the PDF if you're interested in checking it out. The book has already had more than 200 views on the site, I'm pleased to report.

Late Age has been accessible for free online for almost a year, so why am I so excited to see it appear now on Scribd? Mainly because the site just added new sharing features, making it easy to send content to iPhones, Nooks, Kindles, and just about every other major e-reader you can imagine. In other words, The Late Age of Print's mobility-quotient just increased significantly.

I may have some more exciting, mobility-related news about the book, which hopefully I'll be able to share with you in the next week or so. I'll keep you posted. Until then, be sure to check out The Late Age of Print on Scribd, and why don't you go ahead shoot a copy off to your favorite e-reader while you're at it!?

CFP -- Canadian Journal of Media Studies

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES

CALL FOR PAPERS

2009 marks the 30th anniversary of the publication of Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. “[I}t is common knowledge,” he wrote, “that the miniaturization and commercialization of machines is already changing the way learning is acquired, classified, made available, and exploited” (1984, org. 1979: 4). In 2010, "Connected Understanding" will be the theme of the Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities in Montreal (http://www.fedcan.virtuo.ca/congress2010/). The Canadian Journal of Media Studies announces a special issue on Media, Knowledge and the Network University edited by Bob Hanke, York University, and David Spencer, University of Western Ontario.

The massification and informationalization of the university has transformed not only the content of teaching and research but also disciplinary processes of knowledge production and the technological form of academic life and culture. The integration and normalization of ICT's raises many questions about the university, academic labour, scholarly communication and collaboration, and academic technoculture. In 1957, Marshall McLuhan invited us to reconsider the education process by announcing that, with the advent of television, the “classroom without walls” had arrived. A half a century later, we are working in the university without walls and the ICT “revolution” is over. In “Universities, wet, hard, and harder,” German media theorist Friedrich Kittler reviewed 800 years of university-based media history to observe that “universities have finally succeeded in forming once again a complete media system.” Yet media scholars have rarely chosen to study their own universities as media systems. This special issue of the CJMS is an invitation to reflexive, critical media studies. Established and emerging scholars are invited to address continuities and transformations in new media and the network university and to set the agenda for future study and debate.

Possible questions and areas of research and critical inquiry include:

• What is unthought, unrepresented and unquestioned in discussions of the public university and the ‘neoliberal turn,’ technologically-mediated post-secondary education, and institutional initiatives in the virtualization of the educational process?

• What is the impact of the cybernation of the university? What is happening in information technology (IT) infrastructure, planning and governance? What IT strategies are pursued by specific institutions in different jurisdictions? What is the role of IT professionals as intermediaries between IT industries, intermediating organizations, private-sector partners and the university? What is the faculty experience of ICTs, and IT “solutions,” services, and support?

• What are the networks of possibility and affordances of technology, and what are the obstacles and limits? the unintended, unanticipated consequences?

• What hybrid methodologies, research techniques and software enhance our capacity to map the wireless campus and network condition of the university?

• What philosophers of technology and politics are relevant to sharpening our thinking on the question of technology? What scholarly perspectives on invention, innovation and the process of emergence enable us to break the habit of instrumentalist thinking and discard the “tool” metaphor? How can we take technical artifacts, from small, portable technology to entire campus networks, out of their “black boxes” in order to study them? How does the technical substrate matter to our thinking? Our reading and writing of “texts”? Our notions of “research”? How is the university embedded in the network society and cognitive capitalism? What are the drivers of IT change in universities? What are the consequences of the disjuncture between the digital culture and practices outside the university and IT (planning, procurement/evaluation/implementation, support and services) inside universities?

• How can we move beyond user-centric approaches to Web 2.0 based software applications and learning management systems, peer-to-peer networks, and small tech in academic settings? In the new network culture, how can we grasp the relations between what is “given” and what is unlikely, surprising, unexpected and unrealized?

• How can we move beyond debates over “student centered” learning and faculty deskilling to new models of reskilling and organized research networks, technological literacy and technologies of the common? How can we articulate scholarly “collaboration” and student “engagement” with a politics of knowledge (commodified knowledge, open scholarship and knowledge within the social sciences and humanities, popular knowledge, indigenous knowledge, etc.) that will strengthen the public mission of the university after the recession? How can we turn away from the “knowledge economy” and towards knowledge cultures? What does the prototype of the Canadian Institute for Health Research’s Knowledge Broker Model portend for the social sciences and humanities?

We also invite investigations of:

• computerization, campus networking strategies, and ICT-related organizational change since the advent of distributed computing, the Internet and the WWW

• space, time, speed and rhythm in the network university

• the production and operativity of networks and archives, scholarly journals and portals, web-based learning environments and objects, research cyberinfrastructure, critical cyberpedagogy, technological literacy, copyright/left, intellectual property rights

• open access movement, open access research, open educational resources, open courseware, institutional repositories, ‘Do it Yourself’ education or edupunk

• tropes of factory, ecology, network, mobility, common

• articulations and destabilizations of oral/written, actual/virtual, bureaucratic records/institutional memory, off-line/on line, knowledge creation/information sharing, formal learning on campus/informal learning off campus, amateur/professional, artist/researcher

• ideology of convenience, ethos of performativity, immaterial academic labour, general intellect, circuits of knowledge and struggle

• technological “progress,”“knowledge economy,” knowledge “transfer” or “mobilization,” creativity, innovation, academic freedom, academic capitalism

• the coming network university, knowledge futures, ecoethical perspectives on the university’s inputs and outputs and the discourse of “sustainability”

Since intellectual innovation may be engendered at the intersections of disciplines, contributions are welcome from outside of Communication and traditions and trajectories of media studies outside of Canada. Solo or collaborative work that provides a comparative, international perspective on the network university in different countries is especially welcome.

Submission Guidelines

Authors should submit papers of about 25 pages (or 8000 words) in MLA style with abstract and keywords electronically to David Spencer, Editor, dspencer@uwo.ca. With the exception of the title page, please remove all indications of authorship.

The deadline for papers is February 28, 2010. Peer review and notification of acceptance will be completed by March 31, 2010. Final manuscripts accepted for publication will be due April 30, 2010.

Comments and queries can be sent to Bob Hanke, Guest Co-Editor, bhanke@yorku.ca.
For more information about the Canadian Journal of Media Studies, visit http://cjms.fims.uwo.ca/default.htm.

New issue of Culture Machine and...

Before getting down to business with the TOC for the latest issue of Culture Machine, I thought I'd put in a plug for Gary Hall's latest effort. It's called Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (U of MN Press, 2008). The text is something of a manifesto for why Gary does what he does as editor of Culture Machine. It's also so much more. I'd recommend the book highly to anyone navigating their way through the academy and its atavistic publishing apparatus.

---

We are pleased to announce a new edition of the open-access journal
Culture Machine:

CULTURE MACHINE 10 (2009)
http://www.culturemachine.net

PIRATE PHILOSOPHY
Tenth Anniversary Issue, edited by Gary Hall

This tenth anniversary issue of Culture Machine explores how the development of various forms of digital culture and ‘internet piracy’ is affecting notions of authorship, intellectual property, copyright law, publication, attribution, citation, accreditation, fair use, content creation and cultural production that were established pre-internet. Contributors address the theme of piracy in the content and/or by playing provocatively with the form of their texts.


The ‘Pirate Philosophy’ issue features:

• Gary Hall, ‘Pirate Philosophy (Version 1.0): Open Access, Free Content, Free/Libre/Open Media’
• Adrian Johns, ‘Piracy as a Business Force’
• Jonas Andersson, ‘For the Good of the Net: The Pirate Bay as a Strategic Sovereign’
• Don Joyce, Negativland, ‘Vapor Music’
• Kembrew McLeod, ‘Crashing the Spectacle: A Forgotten History of Digital Sampling, Infringement, Copyright Liberation and the End of Recorded Music’
• Alexander R. Galloway, ‘Debord’s Nostalgic Algorithm’
• Mark Amerika, ‘Source Material Everywhere: The Alfred North Whitehead Remix’
• Gary Hall, Clare Birchall and Pete Woodbridge, ‘Liquid Theory TV’
• Gary Hall and Clare Birchall, ‘New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader’

---

ABOUT CULTURE MACHINE

The Culture Machine journal publishes new work from both established figures and up-and-coming writers. It is fully refereed, and has an International Advisory Board which includes Geoffrey Bennington, Robert Bernasconi, Sue Golding, Lawrence Grossberg, Peggy Kamuf, Alphonso Lingis, Meaghan Morris, Paul Patton, Mark Poster, Avital Ronell, Nicholas Royle and Kenneth Surin.

Culture Machine welcomes original, unpublished submissions on any aspect of culture and theory. All contributions to Culture Machine are refereed anonymously. Anyone with material they wish to submit for publication is invited to contact:

Culture Machine c/o Dave Boothroyd and Gary Hall
e-mail: gary.hall@coventry.ac.uk and d.boothroyd@kent.ac.uk

Culture Machine is part of Open Humanities Press: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org

For more information, visit the Culture Machine site at: http://www.culturemachine.net

New to the blog roll

New to the blog roll is Catherine Grant's Film Studies for Free. Catherine is "a full-time researcher and writer on film and culture, affiliated with the School of Film and Media at the University of Sussex [England] as a Visiting Research Fellow." What's great about her site, beyond all the Film Studies resources and smart commentary she provides, is her steadfast commitment to open access. The tag line of Film Studies for Free reads, "commentary on and links to online open-access film studies resources of note." Catherine is one of a growing contingent of humanities scholars who have recognized that scholarship is only as good as its instruments of production, exchange, and propagation.

Her latest post is about Daniel Frampton's book Filmosophy (Columbia University Press, 2007), which I blogged about back in March 2007. There I expressed concern about a disclaimer that accompanied the book's advertising. It indicated that the term "filmosophy" was a registered trademark of Valentin Stoilov. At the time I wondered how the literal ownership of ideas would affect the production of scholarly knowledge and critique. Catherine's blog shows us a better way in its embodiment of the principles of open access.

Enjoy.

"Acknowledged Goods" now live

Last May I posted a short snippet of a paper I was working on to the Differences & Repetitions Wiki. It was called "Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Academic Journal Publishing." The title summarizes the principal focus of the piece. Essentially I wanted to ask: why hasn't the field of cultural studies given its instruments of scholarly communication--journals especially--more critical scrutiny?

I was encouraged by the many comments and questions I received in response to the two pairs of paragraphs and tables that I had posted online. I kept plugging away at "Acknowledged Goods" into the summer and finished a draft sometime in late June. I've been meaning to post the completed piece to D&R^W, but unfortunately other responsibilities have gotten in the way.

Until now, that is. I've finally managed to get "Acknowledged Goods" properly formatted for the wiki, so at long last you can read the whole essay by clicking here. Since this is a longer and much more nuanced version of the work I posted back in May, I'm still very interested in hearing your feedback. Indeed, "Acknowledged Goods" remains a work in progress, so your comments, questions, and concerns will only help as I keep tweaking the piece.

I hope that you enjoy "Acknowledged Goods" and, more important, that it spurs you to action. Academic journal publishing is at a critical crossroads right now, and cultural studies ought to weigh in on its present and future directions.

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.

Another snippet on journal publishing

Well, at long last, I've finished my essay, "Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Academic Journal Publishing." I'll be posting a full draft of the piece to the "Acknowledged Goods" page on the Differences & Repetitions Wiki. The wiki formatting will take some time, however, and for now, I have to direct my energies toward revising an essay on Harry Potter and the simulacrum. Once the full version of "Acknowledged Goods" is up on D&R-W, you'll be sure to hear about it. For now, comments, ratings, and other feedback on this excerpt are welcome here.

---

[From the Section on Alienation]

...Most of us probably have done it at one time or another. By “it” I mean signing a publication agreement for a recently accepted journal article without reading the document carefully, or without pausing to consider the meaning and consequences of all the warrants, indemnities, and clauses ending with those ominous sounding words, “in perpetuity and in any form.” Like me, you probably resigned yourself to committing to the agreement, since the publisher told you, perhaps through a low-level editorial contact at the journal, that publication of your piece was contingent on your doing so without delay. Signing on the dotted line is “policy” she or he probably told you, politely but firmly, and if you do not do so promptly, you are liable to hold up production on the issue in which your work is scheduled to appear. Worse, if you hold out for too long, you risk having your essay dropped altogether. And so begrudgingly you sign, because keeping the process moving along would seem to outweigh whatever benefits might come from making an issue of it.

To me, this is among the most profound—and profoundly alienating—moments of academic labor. I mean this in both the Marxian sense of “alienation,” in which participation in the system of objectified wage labor existentially impoverishes of one’s species-being, as well as in the more strictly legal sense of the term, as defined by Margaret Jane Radin: “a separation of something—an entitlement, right, or attribute—from its holder.” Beyond these definitions, the ritual signing of journal publication contracts is alienating in at least three specific ways.

First, the extreme sense of urgency that tends to surround the whole process is incommensurate with the time it takes for most academic articles to appear in print. In my experience, this interval can last anywhere from six to eighteen months from the day I sign a publication agreement; in rare cases it has been shorter, and I know of myriad instances in which it has taken even longer. The atmosphere of last-minute-ism may help keep the publication process running smoothly. On the downside, it can preempt academic authors from reflecting critically on the legal documents we are charged with signing, which can in turn lead to the hasty forfeiture of key rights and entitlements—assuming we are even aware of them.

Second, the process cultivates a habitus in which we are perpetually disposed “to take one for the team.” Practically no one wants to be the curmudgeon responsible for delaying an entire journal issue while trying to negotiate terms of publication. Publishers recognize this. Consciously or not, they leverage this goodwill by persuading authors to sign away our rights in the name of a collective interest (i.e., timely publication). They do so by capitalizing on an incentive structure in which, ironically, a desire to be perceived as “collegial” and “professional” compels academic authors to deprive one another of the chance to question journal publishers, attorneys, or others about the legal ramifications of publishing our work.

Finally, the contractual moment alienates us scholars from the products of our labor. It customarily involves the transfer of key rights (e.g., ownership, duplication, derivation, etc.) from author to publisher, in whole or in part, in exchange for a variety of value-added services (e.g., typesetting, copyediting, marketing, etc.) and indirect rewards (e.g., promotion, tenure, professional recognition, etc.). Those benefits notwithstanding, signing on the dotted line transforms our labor into economically valuable intellectual property and, down the line, capital—assets publishers use to compete with one another in the marketplace. Our signatures allow journal publishers to disavow liability in matters of copyright infringement, obscenity, and so forth, moreover, thereby endowing them with deep ownership rights over material for which they accept only shallow legal responsibilities. An added “bonus” is that academic authors typically must shoulder all of the costs related to reproducing copyrighted images, song lyrics, and related materials, even though it is the journal publisher who reaps any financial rewards. In these cases, we are not merely giving our labor away, essentially for free; we are effectively paying a third party for the “privilege” of doing so.

Journal publication contracts are magical documents indeed. They transfigure good knowledge into saleable knowledge goods, in a series of moves that implicate us in, while keeping us at arm’s length from, the noisy sphere of industrial production....

Journal publishing in cultural studies

Quite some time ago, I drafted a short conference paper called, "Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Scholarly Journal Publishing." I've presented versions of it at the annual cultural studies conference we hold here at Indiana University and at the "Cultural Studies Now" conference in London (both in 2007). I'll be presenting still another, more refined version of the paper at "Crossroads in Cultural Studies" this July in Kingston, Jamaica.

Since I'm done revising my book, I'm able to return to "Acknowledged Goods" and to begin developing it in earnest. To that end, I've placed a snippet of the paper-in-progress on the Differences and Repetitions Wiki, which you can access by clicking here. I'd appreciate any comments you may have. You can leave feedback right on the site or email suggestions to me directly (striphas@indiana.edu).

Currently, there are only two paragraphs and a couple of tables, so the material shouldn't take you too long to read. The information about journal publishers and their subscription prices may surprise and even alarm you (or, maybe not, if you've been following the open access debates). I'll be adding more to the document in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

More open access

Here's some more good news about open access publishing in the humanities, and it comes at a very interesting time for me. Now that my book, The Late Age of Print, is more or less finished, I'm about to return to the "Cultural Studies and Journal Publishing" essay I've been pecking at for some time now and presenting bits of at conferences.

It's remarkable just how far things have come in a year, especially in the humanities, which has lagged way, way behind the sciences, medicine, and technical fields in terms of making its journal publishing apparatus more open and less corporate. Still, I wonder: does OA journal publishing need to remain so resolutely hierarchical? That's a question I'll be pondering, probably in the conclusion to my essay. I'll be posting the piece to the Differences & Repetitions Wiki for feedback once it's a bit farther along.

Anyway, here's the OA announcement. Congratulations to all those involved on launching the Open Humanities Press initiative, and thank you for your vision.

---

LAUNCH OF OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS – Open Access expands to humanities disciplines with a bold new publishing initiative in critical and cultural theory.

Brussels, Belgium – On May 12, 2008, the Open Humanities Press (OHP) will launch with 7 of the leading Open Access journals in critical and cultural theory. A non-profit, international grass-roots initiative, OHP marks a watershed in the growing embrace of Open Access in the humanities.

“OHP is a bold and timely venture” said J. Hillis Miller, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, a long-time supporter of the Open Access movement and OHP board member. “It is designed to make peer-reviewed scholarly and critical works in a number of humanistic disciplines and cross-disciplines available free online. Initially primarily concerned with journals, OHP may ultimately also include book-length writings. This project is an admirable response to the current crisis in scholarly publishing and to the rapid shift from print media to electronic media. This shift, and OHP’s response to it, are facets of what has been called ‘critical climate change.’”

“The future of scholarly publishing lies in Open Access” agreed Jonathan Culler, Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University and fellow member of OHP’s editorial advisory board. “Scholars in the future should give careful consideration to the where they publish, since their goal should be to make the products of their research as widely available as possible, to people throughout the world. Open Humanities Press is a most welcome initiative that will help us move in this direction.”

OHP will give new confidence to humanities academics who wish to make their work freely accessible but have concerns about the academic standards of online publishing. In addition to being peer-reviewed, all OHP journals undergo rigorous vetting by an editorial board of leading humanities scholars.

OHP’s board includes Alain Badiou, Chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, Donna Haraway, Professor of the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation, UC Irvine, Gayatri Spivak, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University, Peter Suber, Open Access Project Director for Public Knowledge and Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, and Stephen Greenblatt, Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University, who has been leading the public debate on the crisis of academic publishing in the humanities.

“Open-access publishing in serious, peer-reviewed online scholarly journals is one of the keys to solving a financial crisis that has afflicted university libraries everywhere and has had a chilling effect on virtually every academic discipline” said Greenblatt.“Making scholarly work available without charge on the internet has offered hope for the natural sciences and now offers hope in the humanities.”

With initial offerings in continental philosophy, cultural studies, new media, film and literary criticism, OHP serves researchers and students as the Open Access gateway for editorially-vetted scholarly literature in the humanities. The first journals to become part of OHP are Cosmos and History, Culture Machine, Fibreculture, Film-Philosophy, International Journal of Zizek Studies, Parrhesia, and Vectors.

“But it’s not simply a matter of what Open Access can do for the humanities” added Gary Hall, Professor of Media and Performing Arts at Coventry University, co-editor of Culture Machine and one of the co-founders of OHP. “It is also a case of what can the humanities do for Open Access. Researchers, editors and publishers in the humanities have developed very different professional cultures and intellectual practices to the STMs [Science, Technology, and Medicine] who have dominated the discussion around Open Access to date. OHP is ideally positioned to explore some of the exciting new challenges and perspectives in scholarly communication that are being opened up for Open Access as it is increasingly adopted within the humanities.”

##

Open Humanities Press is an international Open Access publishing collective specializing in critical and cultural theory. OHP was formed by academics to overcome the current crisis in scholarly publishing that threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigor worldwide. OHP journals are academically certified by OHP’s independent board of international scholars. All OHP publications are peer-reviewed, published under open access licenses, and freely and immediately available online at www.openhumanitiespress.org.

Rockefeller UP goes CC

From today's Inside Higher Ed:

Rockefeller University Press on Friday announced a shift in copyright policy for the three journals it publishes. The new policy allows authors to re-use their work in any way under a Creative Commons license, so that authors who wish to effectively make their work open and free may do so. The press publishes The Journal of Cell Biology, The Journal of Experimental Medicine and The Journal of General Physiology.

It's only a news brief, but you can find it here. Way to go, RUP, and thanks for supporting open access to ideas! Let the trend continue!

The big announcement, at long last

I've been hinting for weeks (maybe longer) that I had a B-I-G announcement forthcoming about my book, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture From Consumerism to Control. At long last, here it is: the book will be published in 2009 by Columbia University Press!

I'm thrilled, needless to say, because Columbia's such an esteemed press and has published so many books I love: from Rachel Bowlby's Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping to Gary Cross' An All Consuming Century, and from David Henkin's City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's What Is Philosophy? and beyond.

What's also thrilling is that Columbia has agreed to make available, for free, a Creative Commons licensed PDF of The Late Age of Print. It will be released on the internet, concurrent with the publication of the print edition of the book. This is the first time Columbia is producing a book this way, and given my own proclivities toward intellectual property (not to mention the arguments I make in the book), I couldn't be happier to be the test case. What's more, I'm pleased to see another major university press taking a strongly affirmative stance toward open access to ideas.

Many of you who read this blog will find yourselves thanked in the book's acknowledgments. For now, though, a big, blanket "thank you" to all who've supported me throughout the process of researching, writing, revising, and finalizing The Late Age of Print. It's funny--for someone who writes about book publishing, I feel like I learned as much about the book business by trying to get The Late Age of Print published as I did by actually writing it!

Call for papers: The politics of journal publishing

...with gratitude to Amy Pason at the University of Minnesota for sharing this with me. Thanks, Amy!

---

The Political Economy of Academic Journal Publishing

Call for Papers & Proposal for a Special Issue of Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization, to be edited by Craig Prichard & Steffen Böhm.

'Publish or perish', that famous diktat, is without doubt the central, pervasive and unassailable logic governing most academic work in the current period. The central figure, the one around which this decree currently revolves, is, of course, the academic journal article. While the book and perhaps the lecture remain important in some locations, the journal article has become the core currency and the very measure by which academic jobs, careers, reputations and identities are made and traded.

Yet despite all the hours congealed into 'the article', and the years spent perfecting the craft of writing for journal publications, many of us know very little about the industry that surrounds our work and to which we contribute so much. Of course, we may recall certain events: Some will have noted the sale, for nearly US$1 billion, of Blackwell's 875-strong journal collection to US company Wiley in late 2006. Others will be aware that they can now, if they so wish, purchase their already published papers as individual downloads on Amazon.com. There will be some for whom internet-based open access journals (such as ephemera) or online repositories are now the natural home of their written academic work. There may be others whom have confronted the crisis that surrounds journal subscription pricing and are seeing the demise of library journal collections in their university libraries. And there may be a few among us who recognize those journals and publishers that feature in Ted Bergstrom's hall of shame for the most expensive journals currently published (http://www.journalprices.com ). But for all those that recognize such events and processes there are many more for whom such events have 'taken a while to get our attention', as Ron Kirby, the University of California mathematician who led the editorial revolt against Reed Elsevier's pricing strategy at the journal Topography, said recently.

This special issue is an invitation to begin to change that. It is a call for contributions that directly and critically explore the dynamics, problems, tensions, and issues that surround the political economy of academic journal publishing. Part of this is an invitation to explore alternative ways of organizing the production of academic work, particularly the theory, politics and organization of open access publishing, which is, perhaps, the most promising initiative to challenge corporate forms of journal publishing today. This exploration of alternatives is an acknowledgment that the writer and academic author could be regarded, at various moments, as agent, challenger and also victim of hegemonic regimes. We invite inter-disciplinary contributions from around the world and particularly welcome submissions from countries of the Global South, which have seen particular growth of open access publishing initiatives.

Possible topics include (this is not an exhaustive list):

• Political economy of open access publishing
• Academic publishing and the knowledge society
• How to organize an open access journal?
• Political economy of corporate and university press publishing
• The place of journal publishing in the overall apparatus of academic publishing
• Historical perspectives of academic journal publishing
• The hegemony of UK/US publishing & referencing and its global economy
• Issues of censorship in the process of publishing
• Issues of inclusion/exclusion in journal publishing
• Academic publishing in the Global South
• Desires and identities connected to journal publishing
• The public sphere and journal publishing: Who do we really reach?
• The role of journal publishing in the setup and maintenance of professions and disciplines
• Cases of open access publishing
• The organisation of open access repositories
• Case histories of open access repositories
• Copyright vs Copyleft
• Publishing and language: the hegemony of English
• Intellectual property and the impact on academic publishing
• What is a journal's 'impact' and how to measure it?
• The specific role of ephemera: theory & politics in organization in the world of journal publishing and potential 'alternative impact factor measurements'
• Academic evaluation and performance measurement systems (such as the RAE in the UK)
• Publishing outside academia

Full papers should be submitted to the special issue editors via email by 1 November 2008. Papers should be between 5000 and 9000 words; multimedia work is welcome. All submissions should follow Ephemera's submission guidelines:

http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/submit.htm.

All relevant submissions will undergo a double blind review process. The special issue is scheduled to be published in late 2009.

Special issue editors:

Craig Prichard
Tari Whakahaere Kaipakihi,
Te Kunenga Ki Purehuroa
Pouaka Motuhake 11-222
Papaioea, Aotearoa
Department of Management 214
Massey University, Private Bag 11-222
Palmerston North, New Zealand
Phone: +64 (0) 6 356-9099 ext. 2244
Email: c.prichard@massey.ac.nz

Steffen Böhm
School of Accounting, Finance and Management
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester CO4 3SQ UK
Phone: +44 (0) 1206 87 3843
Email: steffen@essex.ac.uk

Update on Harvard's open-access decision

From today's Inside Higher Ed:

Harvard University’s arts and sciences faculty approved a plan on Tuesday that will post finished academic papers online free, unless scholars specifically decide to opt out of the open-access program. While other institutions have similar repositories for their faculty’s work, Harvard’s is unique for making online publication the default option.

You can read the full story here. Way to go, Harvard faculty!

I'm waiting on pins and needles

It seems as though talk about open-access journal publishing is all the rage these days, and with good reason. Preserving the integrity of scholarly communication and its ability to circulate are both pressing issues--the latter, especially, given the emergence of digitally rights managed academic journal content and other types of strictures.  These are changing times indeed.

Apropos, I was heartened to discover this article in today's New York Times.  Apparently, the faculty of Harvard University is voting today to decide whether or not to move toward a system that more fully embraces open-access.  Here's an excerpt:

Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish — on the Web, at least — free.

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.

[...]

“In place of a closed, privileged and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn,” said Robert Darnton, director of the university library. “It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository.”

Under the proposal Harvard would deposit finished papers in an open-access repository run by the library that would instantly make them available on the Internet. Authors would still retain their copyright and could publish anywhere they pleased — including at a high-priced journal, if the journal would have them.

What's exciting (or maybe nerve-wracking) to me is the degree to which Harvard is such a trend-setter.  How the faculty there goes, others are likely to follow.  So, for those of you at Harvard who may be voting today, please support the cause of open-access.  And for those of you who may know folks at Harvard, please tell them to lend their support.

If you need convincing about the merits of open-access, or if you want to learn all there is to learn about the issue, be sure to check out Peter Suber's excellent website.  He also has some extended commentary there about today's vote at Harvard and its implications.  And if you want to read the complete story from the Times, you can access it here.