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.