Marketing Ideas
Reshaping Academic Publishing in a Digital World
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The “markets” for scholarly works are changing, and scholars in the humanities and social sciences – and the institutions where they work – need to both take control of how their works are published and distributed and become much more actively involved in setting the terms for the digital publishing world.
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The rapidly developing digital publishing world is driven by an underlying tension between economic interests in controlling access to digital products and the distributive logic of interlinked digital media. This tension has been playing itself out in well-known ways in the music and entertainment industry, the Writer’s Guild of America strike being one of the most recent incidents. The entertainment industry and, in the academic sector, the hard sciences have gotten the most attention, but humanities and social science scholars need to recognize that though there is less money and less cyberinfrastructure in place, they have professional interests to protect, as do institutions such as universities and scholarly professional organizations. Scholarly and research communities in the humanities and soft social sciences are well behind their peers in the hard sciences on open access and digital publishing in general. Because peer-reviewed scholarship in the humanities and social sciences is as much a public good as is research in the hard sciences, academic institutions and authors, particularly those in the humanities and social sciences who have not been paying attention to the shifts in the digital publishing landscape, need to both take control of how their works are published and distributed and become much more actively involved in setting the terms for the digital publishing world.
There may be markets—and therefore, potential profits—for materials in which hitherto no one had an interest.
What’s so new about digital publishing? One short answer is long tail economics. In 2004 Chris Anderson published “The Long Tail” in Wired, followed by a book of the same title. He argued that traditional production and marketing follow the Pareto Principle, or the “80/20 rule:” 20 percent of the population holds 80 percent of the wealth; 80 percent of profit comes from 20 percent of goods produced. For example, 20 percent of movies will be “hits” and produce 80 percent of a studio’s profit. Anderson argued that the 80/20 rule operates under conditions of scarcity, but that under conditions of abundance of goods and of access to those goods, there is potential for profit in that hitherto untapped 80 percent of goods, which can be cheaply produced and marketed. This is the “long tail,” in which there are niche markets for nearly every product. It’s easy to see how this applies to the entertainment world. But who would have an interest in obscure or difficult scholarly publications in the humanities or social sciences? I don’t think we know. What we do know is that if millions, and perhaps eventually billions, of people have access to on-line search engines and digital media, as Michael Jensen pointed out in his article, “The Deep Niche,” there could be many “niche” markets that simply wouldn’t have existed before. There may be markets—and therefore, potential profits—for materials in which hitherto no one had an interest.
Academic—especially commercial academic—publishers have already begun to exploit such new potential markets. Here is just a sampling:
- A typical journal article can be purchased as a PDF at Science Direct for $30; at Kluwer for $32; at Ingenta for $42. Ingenta began in the academic and research sector, and has expanded to include other forms of publication. Its motto for publishers is “maximizing the value of your content digital assets.”
- Articles in JStor, a subscription journal database, appear in Google searches with a link to a page where an article can be purchased.
- The Review of Metaphysics, a scholarly philosophical journal, sells individual articles and book reviews linked to the books they review at Amazon.com for between $5.95 and $9.95, depending on year of publication, as well as a subscription to the journal for $40.
- Individual book chapters as well as entire books can be purchased as PDF files at the National Academies Press. Just recently, a print copy of a new book was $45.86, a PDF file of the book was $15, and of an individual chapter was $2.50.
- Highbeam.com is an on-line research service that maintains a library of scholarly articles; like JStor, its articles are indexed by Google. In order to view the articles in its database, one must pay a membership fee: $29.95 per month, $199.95 per year, with a 7-day free trial period. Highbeam pays a publisher a licensing fee, just as JStor does; and each may “sell” an article or access to it.
While the profits in the humanities and social science may be small compared to those in the entertainment industry and the hard sciences, the underlying economics are the same. Whether academic or commercial, the publisher’s main interest, just like that of the Hollywood studio’s, or any media entity’s, is in profit; for the publisher, maintaining control over and asserting copyright is a means to profit.
When we turn to the knowledge/culture creators (e.g., scientists, writers, scholars and academic authors, artists, actors), there is more divergence of interests. Most artists and (non-academic) writers think that they, the creators, should have a share in the potential profit of their work. For example, the recent WGA strike was over writers’ share in the profit from “reuse” (sale, on-line streaming, video and DVD downloading, and ad revenue from on-line streaming) of their work. On the other hand, as users, many artists find the permissions and fees for reuse stifling of creative work, and in that respect, are interested less in profit than in looser interpretations of fair use. Academic and scholarly authors (especially in humanities and social sciences; less so in the sciences where there may be commercial gain to be had from the application of scientific work) have shown little concern for issues of monetary gain, and typically have been most interested in dissemination of and access to scholarly works for the sake of ongoing research, scholarship and educational purposes. This is a reflection in part of the academic value of open availability of ideas and knowledge and in part of what has been the economics of print publication. The academic value in openness of ideas is also tied to the fact that the producers of academic and scholarly work have been—and so far still are—the primary users of the work produced, and as such tend to be more interested in open access than in monetary gain for the knowledge/culture creator.
Traditionally, academics have focused on the research and/or “prestige” values of their work, and traditional criteria for tenure and promotion have reinforced the latter. Prior to digital media, in principle, anyone could have purchased a scholarly article. But, in practice it was pretty unlikely because the means of developing an interest in a topic and gaining easy access to the sources did not exist—unless one were associated with a university or research institution—and the sources themselves were scarce and expensive (e.g., small print runs, materials going quickly out of print, high subscription costs). Moreover, in the humanities and social sciences, unlike in the sciences, there is usually no commercial application from which profit could be made. But with digital production (and hence cheap storage and reproduction), the costs of maintaining and delivering digital inventory is miniscule compared to the costs of maintaining print inventory, as Anderson pointed out in his “long tail” analysis, and with on-line search engines there are potential markets even for infrequently purchased items. As the examples above indicate, publishers are already exploiting these markets.
In addition to potentially new dispersed “niche” markets, there are corporate and university markets. The Copyright Clearance Center negotiates, on behalf of publishers, hefty fee structures for corporate access to and reuse of scholarly and research databases. Same with the copyright fees charged to university libraries for “reuse” of scholarly material in the form of Electronic Reserves, course packs and the like. These are all forms of profit, which are magnified by digital media.
If the “markets” for scholarly works are changing, and developments in digital technology—the cyberinfrastructure—suggest that they are, then academic authors and institutions need to take a very different stance towards the conditions under which authors’ works are published and distributed, and to become much more actively involved in reshaping the digital publishing world.
As long as academic authors continue to sign exclusive and restrictive publishing agreements, publishers will control the market.
Whether the interest is profit or dissemination, academic authors need to stop signing restrictive publishing agreements. First, if there is profit to be had, academic authors should have a fair share of it. An academic publishing contract which stipulates that an author collects no share of the sales in each form (e.g., print or digital) until at least 300 copies of that form are sold annually does not give the author a fair share of the profit. There is no extra cost to the publisher annually; once produced, the sale of a digital product is almost entirely profit; similarly for print copies if print on demand is well-established. Second, for purposes of dissemination, authors may be poorly served by a standard restrictive publishing agreement which grants publication and distribution rights exclusively to the publisher. If a publisher decides to not distribute or “print” the work, the author may have little or no avenue for having her or his work distributed.
Universities, too, have an interest in how this new world is structured. As things stand now, universities already pay the salaries of academic authors, and hefty subscriptions to journals and research databases. Thus, when a university has to pay copyright fees it could, ironically, and unlike corporate clients, end up paying twice or even thrice for the use of material. For example, if the school puts a digital copy of one of its print journals on E-reserve, or if a faculty member posts a digital copy of an article from one of the university’s print or electronic journals on a course management website, the university may have to pay a copyright fee—yet the university already owns that material, paid for it, and may even have paid to produce it, as one of its own employees, or an employee of another university, which is in the same boat, may have created it in the first place.
There have been attempts by academic organizations and universities— such as MIT, and most recently Harvard—to have open access digital repositories of at least their own faculty members’ works, but thus far, these efforts have not been particularly successful. Until such efforts are widely coordinated among all universities—and not just a few elite ones —and equipped with indexed and searchable information, this does not constitute the kind of system-wide restructuring of the publishing domain that would be in the broad interest of researchers, scholars, and the public. There is a lot of discussion about this—for example, at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at Berkeley and at the information technology non-profit Ithaka, but thus far no coordinated action.
There are alternative copyright licensing structures, such as Creative Commons or the GNU Free Documentation License, that might serve as models of what could be developed for publishing digital works. But whatever the models developed, the main point is that as long as academic authors continue to sign exclusive and restrictive publishing agreements, publishers will control the market. Once an author has signed the copyright and licensing rights to her or his work over to a publisher, the law is on the side of the publisher who enforces copyright as a means to making profit. Such enforcement can include curtailing the author’s ability to disseminate her or his own work, as well as collecting clearance and reuse fees through the Copyright Clearance Center and issuing “take-down” notices of electronically posted material.
Under The Copyright Term Extension Act, copyright for a work created after January 1, 1978 subsists from its creation and (with some specific exceptions) endures for a term consisting of the life of the author and 70 years after the author’s death. If an author has signed a standard exclusive and restrictive academic publishing agreement, and if a work unexpectedly “sells,” the profit will go exclusively to the publisher and the licensing fees will be collected exclusively by the publisher.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act gives copyright holders, usually commercial publishing and media companies, legal tools to enforce alleged violations of technological anti-piracy measures on digital media. DMCA is particularly worrisome since it appears to give greater control to the copyright holder of digitized works that are encoded and encrypted in digital media than to copyright holders of print media; the former appear to have exclusive control over access and use for an indefinite period of time. Copyright infringement does not have to have been established for a “take down” notice to be issued under DMCA, even when a strong or reasonable fair use defense could be made. It remains to be seen whether and to what extent this will adversely affect things like Interlibary Loan of digital materials and any subscription or password protected materials.
All the more reason then for academic authors with the luxury of salary and tenure to take the lead and to be actively engaged in widespread coordinated action to restructure the publishing world—untenured academics are in a more vulnerable position until the profession reconceives its criteria for tenure and promotion. For example, authors could stipulate in their publishing agreements that no reuse fees be collected from universities and public libraries. Or, they could play a role in pricing so that even those not affiliated with a university could afford to purchase scholarly work. The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition has developed tools for authors to help them renegotiate agreements with publishers and this might be a place for individual academic authors to start.
Universities, too, need to engage in coordinated, systematic action to facilitate more reasonable conditions for the dissemination of ideas that is the lifeblood of research.
At the same time, individual attempts to negotiate with publishers may not be a sufficiently coordinated action to make a dent in current publishing practices and to overcome each individual’s interest in publication for other reasons—for example, getting their ideas published, prestige, tenure, and promotion. All the more reason, then, for scholarly organizations and universities to get into the act if humanities and social science scholars are really going to reorient themselves to the technology and new economics of digital publishing. Even in the sciences, which are ahead of the humanities and social sciences in terms of grappling with the implications of digital publishing, a huge amount of scientific scholarship still lives behind a subscription wall, earning publishers huge amounts of money. However, the sheer volume of research available in open-access repositories like PubMed Central (for life sciences) and arXiv.org (for physics and computational sciences) is evidence of very different approaches in the sciences: not negotiations with publishers, but either Federally-mandated access (for NIH-funded research) or total circumvention of the traditional publishing route (despite the fact that many of the papers uploaded to arXiv.org are eventually accepted for publication in professional refereed journals). In the humanities there have been some developments in this regard, including Ars Disputandi and Philosophers’ Imprint, but thus far, they have tended to be somewhat isolated and marginal.
Universities, too, need to engage in coordinated, systematic action to facilitate more reasonable conditions for the dissemination of ideas that is the lifeblood of research. Right now publishers compete with one another developing software tools that may be of little use to users, and there is tremendous duplication of effort and resources both among universities—between presses, libraries and IT departments—and publishers building the cyberinfrastructure for producing and managing scholarly work. Universities are the primary customers and users of scholarly work, and therefore, have tremendous leverage if they exercise it in a coordinated fashion.
While there may be some discipline-specific issues such that a single model won’t work for all areas, institutions—i.e., universities and scholarly organizations—and academic authors from all areas need to take an active role in setting the terms for digital publishing and in exploring the development of systematic and coordinated reputable peer reviewed open access venues. ”Open” need not necessarily mean “free,” but it does mean that publishers’ interest in profit should not be the controlling force of the digital publishing world, at least as far as scholarship and research are concerned. Researchers, scholars and academic institutions need to take the lead. Doing so would encourage treating knowledge and culture products as public goods, rather than only as property, and as part of the information commons that nourishes open and informed democratic societies.
©2008 K.A. Wallace
K.A. Wallace is a Professor of Philosophy at Hofstra University.
Comments on this article
I for one believe the current academic publishing industry is unstable. Nobody who participates in it really has a fundamental motivation to maintain it, other than the publishing companies themselves, and they are slowly being cut out of the loop. We write the articles, we review the articles, and generally the taxpayer pays for the research - why should Elsevier, or any other publishing company, be making any money off of it? The organizational work that they once did can now easily be done (and is being done) via well designed web applications. The only thing that props the publishers up is the fact that, for now, some of them are more prestigious than their open access counterparts. Eventually the tipping point will come, and the industry will collapse, and the world’s academic literature will be forever after free.
April 10th, 2008 at 10:40 pmThe strong market for permissions through venues such as CCC has eroded fair use in academia in the United States. The current lawsuit filed by Oxford UP, Cambridge UP, and Sage Publications against Georgia State University should give us a legal precedent for the definition of fair use in the digital environment. As long as academic authors continue to sign away rights to their own work, publishers will fight for their rights as owners of this literature. Academics need education about the open-access movement, Creative Commons licensing, and rights retention.
April 18th, 2008 at 5:22 pmYour writing and eloquent emphasis on the paradigm shift relating to digital content is so relevant. From my artist daughter to every professional I engage with, failing to take ownership of the issue of ownership in the new world will continue to propel old paradigms at the cost of much greater good - the sharing of ideas and the education of an ever expanding world under a set of new rules not governed exclusively by institutions of old. Thank you for an excellent article.
September 7th, 2008 at 6:56 pmBy the way, I failed to mention Zane’s comments are on point. As with many industries, institutions and organizations the tipping point rapidly approaches.
September 7th, 2008 at 6:58 pmI agree with Sarah McCleskey that “academics need education,” but it depends on how accurate the education is. While Professor Wallace’s article conveys some useful and correction information, its overall value is undermined by some false or misleading assertions. Consider this claim: “Scholarly and research communities in the humanities and soft social sciences are well behind their peers in the hard sciences on open access and digital publishing in general.” Perhaps true as a very broad generalization, but the existence of Project Muse (an electronic database with now over 400 journals in the humanities from university presses and other non-profit publishers and over 1,300 institutional subscribers worldwide) since 1995 makes this claim patently untrue for the humanities journal sector. The “long tail” has been exploited by university presses at least since Google started its Book Search project, and most presses now have most of their backlist titles digitized and available for purchase via “print on demand” vendors through regular bookstores as well as online retailers like Amazon. While it is true that most academic authors publish for reasons other than monetary return, some make a great deal of money on the sales of their books, and some authors even of journal articles do, too, if they are widely and repeatedly used in coursepacks. And every press that publishes journals that I am know shares income from subsidiary uses, usually 50/50, with authors. So this statement is completely false: “If an author has signed a standard exclusive and restrictive academic publishing agreement, and if a work unexpectedly ’sells,’ the profit will go exclusively to the publisher and the licensing fees will be collected exclusively by the publisher.” If we all move toward “open access,” which may be worth doing on general grounds of the greater public good, some academic authors at least will be sacrificing many thousands of dollars. Prof. Wallace seems to think every academic publisher is in the business for profit: “Whether academic or commercial, the publisher’s main interest, just like that of the Hollywood studio’s, or any media entity’s, is in profit; for the publisher, maintaining control over and asserting copyright is a means to profit.” That is simply not true for university presses; in fact, any surpluses presses make are reinvested in their business or else appropriated by their parent universities and used for other purposes. And most presses do not have any surpluses at all but are subsidized by their parent universities (on the average, by about 10% of their operating costs). The following statement contains many errors of fact: “Whether the interest is profit or dissemination, academic authors need to stop signing restrictive publishing agreements. First, if there is profit to be had, academic authors should have a fair share of it. An academic publishing contract which stipulates that an author collects no share of the sales in each form (e.g., print or digital) until at least 300 copies of that form are sold annually does not give the author a fair share of the profit. There is no extra cost to the publisher annually; once produced, the sale of a digital product is almost entirely profit; similarly for print copies if print on demand is well-established. Second, for purposes of dissemination, authors may be poorly served by a standard restrictive publishing agreement which grants publication and distribution rights exclusively to the publisher. If a publisher decides to not distribute or ‘print’ the work, the author may have little or no avenue for having her or his work distributed.” Some contract for some monographs, it is true, do not offer a royalty until a certain number of copies have been sold. But Wallace’s description, which only discusses marginal costs, completely ignores the publisher’s need to recoup “first copy” publication costs. Often the need not to offer a royalty on a certain number of copies is prompted by the importance of being able to keep the price at a certain level, to encourage individual purchase or course adoption. The second claim is belied by the nature of publishing contracts, which all contain clauses obligating the press to publish the work in a certain format within a certain period of time, failing which the author may reclaim the rights to the work; and they also define a period of time after which an author may recover all rights once a book goes “out of print” as defined in the contract. With regard to e-reserve and other uses of works in universities, it is simply not true that the university has already paid for those uses by subscribing to a journal or otherwise purchasing it. Any reuse that results in the duplication of extra copies is not a right conveyed by purchase, under U.S. copyright law, unless it falls within the scope of “fair use.” And we will all see what the outcome of the suit against Georgia State University is–although the state of Georgia relies on a very idiosyncratic interpretation of “fair use” that derives from the writings of the late L. Ray Patterson, a former law professor at the University of Georgia, a view not shared by most experts in the field. While I completely agree on the need for more education for academics, then, I would hope that the education given them is more accurate than what appears in this article.
January 10th, 2009 at 6:17 pmI’m assuming that Sandy Thatcher is the Sandy Thatcher, Director of Penn State University Press, a knowledgeable person about publishing; here’s a link to his writings: http://www.psupress.org/news/SandyThatchersWritings.html. I appreciate his perspective, but, I would like to respond to what he says are some inaccuracies in the essay.
In the essay, I said, “Scholarly and research communities in the humanities and soft social sciences are well behind their peers in the hard sciences on open access and digital publishing in general.” Sandy cites the existence of Project Muse as evidence against this. A couple of things: (1) Of course humanities scholars use things like Project Muse; (2) Project Muse is not free or open access; it is a subscription service; (3) Many humanities authors are unfamiliar with copyright and with what publication agreements bind them to; (4) In the humanities, in particular, but in the social sciences as well, there is considerably less organized and well-developed outlets for open access articles than there is in the sciences, although that is starting to change. By scholarly and research communities I meant to include not just publishers, but authors and researchers.
Whether an author of a journal article makes a great deal of money on the sale of an article if it is widely and repeatedly used (e.g., in course packs or in other forms) depends on the publishing agreement that the author made with the journal. While some journals agree to split some reuse fees and subsidiary use income with an author, many, at least in my experience, do not. The most recent publishing agreements with which I have been presented, for example, one from a commercial publisher of an academic journal provided for no such sharing of income from subsidiary uses. Moreover, “subsidiary uses” are changing dramatically – for example, a journal may sell an individual article online, or sell time-restricted access to an article online for $30 or more per article or viewing. The question is, what should be the author’s share of such a revenue stream?
It is true that university presses are in a very different position from commercial publishers and perhaps that should have been made clearer in the essay. And it is true that much of scholarly publishing, particularly in the humanities – at least under the traditional model of such publishing – cannot survive without subsidy, perhaps mooting a concern about income stream from such publications. But, I don’t think we know that; that is indeed, one of the points of the long tail. Individual journal articles are now sold on-line, sold to for profit subscription services (such as Highbeam); individual book chapters can be sold on-line, and so on. If there is going to be income from such sales, the question is, what is the author’s fair share of that income? With books, even if we grant that a university press needs to recoup “first copy” publication costs – and hence, the author has no share in the income from the first 300 copies of the sale of a book, that argument does not hold for stipulating that the author gets no income in *any* year from print sales or digital sales until for each year 300 copies in that form (print or digital) have been sold. It is the latter to which I was specifically objecting when I said “until at least 300 copies of that form are sold *annually* does not give the author a fair share of the profit.”
Now, to the extent that books are regarded as the “gold standard” for promotion and tenure, there may be pressure on university presses to publish books and monographs while at the same time experiencing declining revenue from such publications. Some of the costs of doing so may be reducible through digital media. For example, digital printing, e.g., short-run digital printing and print on demand, may allow a publisher to print fewer copies at a time, and thus overcome unused inventory expenses. Moreover, books could be sold without printing them at all, but as PDFs. If the idea of the long tail is that there is a small revenue stream every year, albeit diminishing presumably over time, rather than an initial revenue bump from library and scholars’ purchases when a book first comes out, then the contract I described in the previous paragraph virtually guarantees that a typical scholarly author (whose book will never sell in that volume in any given year) will never receive any of that income. If there is going to be income, is that how it should be distributed (or not)? If the publisher has no inventory costs due to digital printing capabilities, then whatever income (after production costs) is generated through the long tail is simply profit. Maybe the profit is so slim as to not be worth setting up mechanisms for sharing it with authors. But, the point is that publishing is changing and authors need to at least be part of the discussion as to what that new publishing paradigm should look like.
On the issue of E-reserve, Sandy says, “With regard to e-reserve and other uses of works in universities, it is simply not true that the university has already paid for those uses by subscribing to a journal or otherwise purchasing it. Any reuse that results in the duplication of extra copies is not a right conveyed by purchase, under U.S. copyright law, unless it falls within the scope of ‘fair use.’” The question is whether and if so, to what extent, copying for E-reserve constitutes fair use. And that is indeed a difficult issue and one which Sandy has written about, going back to the 70s. But, that wasn’t my point. My point was that the work that appears in journals has been produced by researchers who have been paid by universities, not publishers. Universities then pay to buy the work of researchers that is published in journals when they purchase a journal or database subscription. If the university owns both a print version of a journal and databases in which the journal is also packaged, it may pay several times for the same content. Now, of course, for any one university almost all that it purchases has not been produced by the scholars at that one university, but universities collectively have paid for the knowledge production that the publishers are disseminating. Universities pay again in the form of reuse fees when they make a copy of an article to put on reserve for student use. It seems to me that universities are subsidizing several times over the production and dissemination of such work, and that scholarly authors and universities might be rethinking what it is they are subsizing. Collectively, they would have a lot of leverage if they chose to use it to advance their collective interest in having this structure work for them.
In one of his recent articles, Sandy argued that the above is an unfair characterization of the situation (“From the university presses – On the author’s addendum,” _Against the Grain_, June 2008, pp. 66-71). Rather than universities merely subsidizing publishers’ profit, Sandy argued that the fees that universities pay pay for a great deal of value added by publishers, value that is expensive to offer, such as sophisticated editorial management systems to facilitate the peer-review and production process, increasing efficiencies; use of XML coding to allow repurposing of the content, addition of digital object identifiers (DOIs) to permit cross-linking between citations and sources through CrossRef. In addition, publishers have trained staff who deal with the business matters connected with the collection of rights that fall within copyright (e.g., responding to requests for permission to reproduce an article in a coursepack, and to requests to use quotations that are lengthier than would be covered by “fair use”; dealing with translation rights and requests; and so on), such that publishers serve as author’s agents for these purposes.
It may be true that there is value added by publishers and that much of what publishers do is not something that either universities or individual authors are themselves prepared to do. However, it seems to me that there is tremendous duplication, redundancy and then incompatibility between systems produced by publishers, and that in so far as much of this enables publishers to keep material behind the subscription wall, it thwarts rather than facilitates dissemination in a rational and fair manner. It is not clear to me that, at least for the most part, publishers are serving as *authors’* agents as far as copyright goes. And while it is true that most academic authors are not dependent on royalties to make a living, that doesn’t mean they don’t have an interest in receiving a fair share of what revenue there is to be had. As things are currently structured most publishers are interested in securing their own rights to future income and control over the information that they are entrusted with disseminating. Publishers may indeed have legitimate interests here, but so do authors. And for the most part, academic authors in the humanities and social sciences have not been as actively involved in helping to reshape the publishing landscape as I am suggesting they should be.
It seems to me that authors themselves need to become actively and centrally involved in the processes by which publishing is being reshaped, and not leave it only up to publishers. Perhaps something like SCOAP is suggestive of alliances that researchers and scholars, universities and publishers could make for a rational and fair structure to the production and dissemination of knowledge. Perhaps some form of open access is a solution, although I’m not sure about a “gift economy.” For, there is work involved in producing knowledge and costs to disseminating it and I’m not sure if all knowledge production should be available for “free”. So, I don’t know what the right configuration of interests should look like. But, my main point is that individual authors and scholars in the humanities and social sciences need to be involved in the discussion of these issues and in shaping the policies and structures which will control the dissemination of their work.
March 29th, 2009 at 3:20 pm