Laura M. Stevens, University of Tulsa
Vol. 32, No.1 (Spring 2013), 7-21
Getting What You Pay For? Open Access and the Future of Humanities Publishing
Like most humanists, I believe that the free circulation of knowledge and ideas is a good thing. Knowledge, like fresh air and water, should be available to all, bringing well-being to those exposed to it. The unrestricted transmission of ideas and discoveries enriches us all, just as their hoarding produces intellectual stagnation. To hold back the sharing of ideas ultimately harms their owners as much as it hurts those deprived of the ideas, creating a climate of scarcity and suspicion.
I also believe, with equal fervor, that free labor is not a good thing. Except when it is offered as a gift, out of friendship or charity, labor should receive fair compensation. Such a notion seems almost too obvious to require stating, and I cannot imagine that many readers of this feminist publication would disagree.
These two convictions pull me in opposite directions when I consider the issue of open access. At the core of this tension is our dual understanding of the word “free” as unrestricted but also as uncompensated. Although I am excited by the idea of free—meaning unrestricted—access to the products of intellectual labor, my position as the editor of a scholarly journal in the field of literature leaves me deeply concerned about the long-term impact open access will have on the notion that intellectual endeavor should be free in the sense of freely offered, uncompensated. The widespread defunding that research, teaching, and publishing in the liberal arts have suffered, through the withdrawal of government support and through cuts within university budgets, makes this problem increasingly urgent. My worry is that the old adage, “You get what you pay for,” may end up too accurately describing humanities scholarship, resulting in a situation where the quality of scholarship declines or where we pay more—literally and figuratively, collectively but also individually—than we have under more traditional funding models.
The open access movement, which strives to make scholarly work freely available through distribution on the Internet, has been underway for about a decade now. It seems appropriate to present a definition of this term from its entry in Wikipedia, arguably the quintessential open access resource, with its infinite and continual openness to revision-in-the-moment:
Open access (OA) is the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly research. . . . The two most common ways to provide open access are through self-archiving, also known as ‘green’ open access, and open access journals, known as ‘gold’ open access. With green open access authors publish in any journal and then self-archive a version of the article for gratis public use in their institutional repository, in a central repository (such as PubMed Central), or on some other open access website.1
Open access clearly is a well intentioned and important movement, advocating for the free circulation of ideas in a world where the means and scope of information transmission have been changed dramatically by the World Wide Web.
The opening of the Max Planck Society’s “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities,” one of three major statements on open access made by scientific and scholarly bodies at the beginning of this millennium, makes clear what is at stake in advocacy for open access:
The Internet has fundamentally changed the practical and economic realities of distributing scientific knowledge and cultural heritage. For the first time ever, the Internet now offers the chance to constitute a global and interactive representation of human knowledge, including cultural heritage and the guarantee of worldwide access.2
Such declarations constitute a push against the threat of a World Wide Web in which the transmission of all information has a price, enriching the few possessors of proprietary knowledge while leaving many in intellectual and financial poverty. These efforts seem especially understandable and important as a response to the exorbitantly expensive institutional subscription prices that some journals—especially in the fields of science, medicine, and technology—and some for-profit aggregators now charge.3
In addition to bypassing obstacles that prevent the spread of knowledge beyond those who can afford it, the green form of open access is grounded in implicit claims about the control and fair use of intellectual property. Although publishers traditionally have owned the copyright to scholarly publications, green access is an assertion of the author’s right to share the results of his or her labor. Similarly, many universities have begun establishing open commons in which they make publicly available the research and scholarship of their faculty and students. Such endeavors acknowledge the substantial investment universities have made—through salaries, libraries, laboratories, and equipment—in the research endeavors taking place on their campuses, making them stakeholders in the results of such research.
I endorse the ideals and goals that underlie such endeavors. At the same time, I find a crucial omission at the core of many declarations supporting open access. Consider this statement from the website of the Public Library of Science (PLOS), a nonprofit online publisher and advocate for open access:
Paying for access to content makes sense in the world of print publishing, where providing content to each new reader requires the production of an additional copy, but online it makes much less sense to charge for content when it is possible to provide access to all readers anywhere in the world.4
Certainly it is true that publication online is cheaper than publication on paper, but online publication most certainly is not costless. Printing charges are not even the greatest expenses faced by a publisher. When Jennifer Crewe, Editorial Director of Columbia University Press, wrote in the 2004 issue of Profession that “it costs a university press about $25,000 to $30,000 to publish a book of average length without too many illustrations,” she specified,
Less than half this figure is taken up by costs that are dedicated to producing the physical book—editing, design, putting the book into type, paper, printing, and binding. The lion’s share of the money pays for all the press staff time that goes into really publishing the book, as opposed to just getting the copies printed.5
I am surprised to see how often discussions of online publication seem to work from the assumption that nonpaper publication is free to produce and therefore should be free to its readers.
One might call this a problem of invisible or intangible labor. It is of course widespread in our global information economy, and it is at the core of the forces that have driven many newspapers and periodicals out of business. The labor expenses that were bundled into the costs of paper and print—all covered in the past by purchase of the material object along with advertising revenue—have been ignored and hence unfunded once the material printed object has been replaced by its online version. We now act as though the labor of producing texts is itself an avatar, an image of work rather than the real thing, which thus receives the image of compensation rather than the real thing.
The effects of these assumptions are devastating for writers and artists outside of academia, as the author and cartoonist Tim Krieder pointed out this year in a New York Times opinion piece.6 Wryly commenting on the “side effect of our information economy, in which ‘paying for things’ is a quaint, discredited old 20th-century custom, like calling people after having sex with them,” he draws upon his own experiences in order to point out how the promise of “exposure” through website hits and general publicity now routinely replaces true compensation for writing. Authors and artists have been transformed into content providers, finding larger audiences than they could have had in print even as they have dropped quietly out of systems of compensation. Attention and admiration are no substitute for pay, however. Krieder writes,
Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It’s especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge.
The only response an author can have to such a situation, Krieder argues, is to refuse to give his or her writing away for free.
Most scholarly publications in the humanities, especially the most respected ones, have the added problem of never having made profits in the first place. Krieder’s commentary thus applies only in a limited way to the world of scholarly journals, which almost never pay their authors, nor do they compensate their peer reviewers. To do so never was or would have been financially viable given the small audiences of most academic publication. This is what Kathleen Fitzpatrick refers to as “the problem of the ‘long tail’ in scholarly publishing” (p. 349). As she explains:
In traditional publishing, a few bestsellers provide financial support for the much less popular items on the list—those items down the tail that are extremely important to someone, though they are unlikely to reach a terribly large audience. The problem for us is that scholarly publications are all tail. Practically the only audience for traditionally published scholarship is the same small group of scholars who are producing it, and yet . . . for those scholars, the work is indispensable. (p. 349)7
Rather, scholarly journals, like university presses, traditionally have existed as nonprofit venues in which scholarship can be published for the preservation and circulation of ideas apart from market forces. Within this formulation, research and writing are labors of love, but they also are counted as part of the activity for which scholars earn their salaries or demonstrate their qualifications for hiring. In this sense scholarly publication always has relied on the free labor of authors, along with peer reviewers, as part of a larger system of university subsidization. But just as the casualization of labor in higher education—in which progressively fewer instructors have secure salaries, let alone time and support for their research—throws even this last assumption into question, we no longer can count on universities to provide the more basic financial support that journals traditionally have received.8
Krieder’s essay does have relevance, however, in its basic effort to make us recognize what is lost when we take for granted the labor that goes into producing and publishing a text. This is especially the case when we make the decision to give away that text for free. When we assume that publishing scholarship online is costless, we ignore the hours of work that go into transforming an author’s manuscript—itself, of course, the result of countless hours of labor—into a published article or book. For Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, as for many scholarly journals, this work includes communications with authors and readers that make possible double anonymous peer review; editing and copyediting accepted manuscripts; tracking down and verifying every citation and quotation in an article; preparing and checking page proofs; and communicating with authors through every stage of this process. At Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, this work is performed by our managing editor, a crew of graduate student interns, and myself as editor. The result, we hope, is a work of higher, more polished, and error-free quality than any one author could produce on her or his own. Admittedly my position is biased, but this seems to me a thing worth having.
I understand and sympathize with authors who place articles that they have published in traditional peer reviewed journals online in an open access format, and I fully support the doctrine of fair use. I also understand and so far have responded positively to universities’ requests to make articles from Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature authored by their faculty or students available on their commons. I do not think, however, that many scholars have considered fully the long-term effects that such distribution can have in rendering traditional humanities journals obsolete. It is one matter to oppose the monopoly threat posed by the expensive for-profit journals one encounters, for example, in the fields of medicine and science; it is quite another to oppose paper subscription rates that are deliberately kept low (the annual rates for Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature are $22.00 for individuals in the United States, $20 for students, and $25 for individuals outside the country) or the royalties earned by nonprofit humanities journals from nonprofit aggregators such as JSTOR and Project MUSE. Such aggregators, which operate largely through institutional subscriptions, have proven the financial salvation of many liberal arts journals, and they seem to be in no danger at the moment. However, it is crucial to ponder what a doctrine of open access, if followed to its logical end, means for humanities research in the long run. More broadly, we need to consider how we want the publication and distribution of humanities scholarship to be structured in the future.
Let us therefore consider our choices. Bracketing for the moment the question of peer review (another practice currently subject to much debate, which I addressed in the preface to our Fall 2010 issue), we, as individuals pursuing and supporting scholarship in the humanities, need to decide if we want to work in a field in which scholarship is published in a polished, edited, proofread form. If the answer is no, then we are venturing ultimately into a world in which all scholarship is self-published, with the work that editors normally do falling on the shoulders of the authors. This shift in turn will require a process of determining how we assess do-it-yourself academic publication. Various methods and outcomes are possible, and each of these is likely to entail its own costs. Consider, for example, the possibility of shifting to an emphasis on “impact” rather than the quality of a published piece as is indicated (accurately or not, fairly or not) by peer review and the reputation of the journal in which it is published. This is a viable model, but how will impact be measured? Will the humanities follow the sciences in outsourcing impact assessments to professional indexing services? Will we fall back on strictly quantitative measurements, counting citations or hits on websites? Will the obscure publication be considered the worthless one? Are these approaches in keeping with the spirit of humanistic inquiry?9
Turning back to the question of whether we want to work in a field in which scholarship is published in a polished, edited, proofread form: if the answer is yes, then we need to consider closely the question of how the labor of editing is to be funded. The traditional funding model is one in which universities subsidize both the production and consumption of scholarly journals. That is, universities provide office space and supplies, assistantships to graduate students, salaries to managing editors, and course releases to faculty editors, thereby funding production; they pay for library subscriptions to journals, thereby funding through consumption. This model of course has been on the wane for quite a while now, as universities, especially public ones, cut library budgets while also withdrawing salary and graduate assistantship support for editorial staff. I consider myself fortunate to edit a journal that still receives institutional funding out of recognition that our missions of scholarship and teaching are reciprocally enhancing and closely intertwined, but such support is becoming quite rare.
That there is a crisis in scholarly publishing is hardly news, and we are short on proposed solutions.10 I have no big answers, but I do have a few thoughts. First, trapped as higher education is these days in tyrannies of metrics and ranks, ranging from the United Kingdom’s Research Excellence Framework to U. S. News and World Report’s annual rankings of universities and colleges, I occasionally muse about the possibility of establishing metrics for support of scholarly publication in the liberal arts. For example, what if we could assign every university a ratio that measured its scholarly requirements for tenure against the support the institution provided for the publication of scholarly research? A university that required a great deal of publication from its faculty but that did little to support scholarly publication (for example by subsidizing a journal or university press) would be assigned a ratio that marked it as a debtor, while institutions that underwrote scholarly publishing a great deal would be assigned a ratio that marked it as a creditor. It is unlikely that such a metric would come into use, but concise data points like these do tend to catch the attention of administrators, boards, and even state legislators, especially when they rank institutions against each other. At any rate, I like the concept as a way of highlighting what universities stand to lose—for their systems of tenure, but also for the intellectual vibrancy of their teaching—when they do not support academic publishing in the fields most likely to be crushed under market pressures.
All such musings aside, the days of lavish institutional underwriting for humanities publications are increasingly behind us and seem unlikely to return in the near future for most institutions of higher education. Barring philanthropic individuals and foundations (a wonderful but rare source of support), this leaves us with the other possible sources of funding: payment by the reader and payment by the author. As far as I can tell, an open access system, in which readers do not pay anything, is likely to lead in the long run to a system in which the author pays for the labor involved in publishing polished, edited work. That is, if universities will no longer subsidize academic journals, and if readers do not pay to read them, then one of the few options left is to require payment from authors. Essentially this approach would extend the device of the university press subvention— now a widely accepted practice—from monographs to articles. It is already a practice commonly in use in science journals, to the extent that such fees are now routinely included in applications for the grants that fund much scientific research. Whether it is a viable model for the humanities is in question. One conclusion of the 2009 report “The Future of Scholarly Journals Publishing Among Social Science and Humanities Associations” was that the author-funded model is “not currently a sustainable option” for humanities journals.11 Viable or not, whether it is the model that best serves the humanities is an important question we have yet to answer. Certainly it would threaten to deepen already extant hierarchies, systems of exclusion, and, yes, systems of access beyond the access of readers to texts.
Rather than charging authors to publish, another option would be to make routine the requirement (or perhaps the courtesy) of payments to print journals when authors post their articles for open access or when universities post faculty publications on their commons. Such fees should be reasonable, perhaps equaling the cost of single print issue or annual subscription, but they would provide journals with a minimal income to support the staff and graduate assistants who perform the hard, unglamorous labor—such as proofreading or verifying citations—that separates a draft from a publication.
I am glad to assure our readers that such fears loom nowhere near the horizon for Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Speaking from my vantage point as the editor of a journal not in financial crisis, but aware of other journals that are, I ask authors and readers alike to consider carefully what is at stake when they post their publications from nonprofit scholarly journals for free online. At a minimum, consider paying the journal that published your work the courtesy of consulting with its editors or staff before posting, get some sense of the journal’s financial health, and think about the impact of your posting on that journal’s bottom line. We might consider Krieder’s advice to fellow authors that they not give their work away or that they do so judiciously, with careful thought about the longterm consequences. In the case of scholarly publication, what is at stake is not the fee an author might earn, but the fee an author might have to pay, and of course the less tangible costs to us all as readers, teachers, and producers of scholarly inquiry.
I also ask that supporters of the open access movement—a movement that I value and support, especially as a response to the hoarding of knowledge for the extraction of vast profits—acknowledge the importance of supporting the labor that helps deliver that knowledge in verified, edited, proofread form to as wide an audience as possible. I do not see this as an either/or proposition—that is, either providing open access or supporting academic journals in the humanities. I do, though, see a need for a more finely calibrated and thoughtful conversation about the best way to meet both of these goals. Certainly that conversation is beginning to take place, for example in Fitzpatrick’s proposal that we conceptualize the publication and transmission of scholarly knowledge through frameworks of value rather than cost, drawing on models of generosity and gifts rather than payments and profits as we envision the transformation of scholarly publishing from paper-based paradigms:
What would it mean for [not-for-profit] publishers to create systems within which authors, reviewers, and editors were able to pay forward what they have received, to give their work to one another and to the public beyond? What would it mean for publishers to give all of that content away, and to focus their value production on developing advanced services for interacting with that content and with the community? (p. 358)12
Thinking about a gift economy will hardly pay the bills, but it is at least a creative approach to what seems an intractable problem, and it promises to open up the conversation surrounding open access and scholarly journals. Much creativity and conversation are needed as we continue to address these issues.
For now, I seek most of all to instill more thoughtfulness in all of us who are engaged in—and invested in—humanistic scholarship and teaching. Those of us who care about learning and teaching in the humanities render that labor invisible at our peril. The form and structure of scholarly publication in the humanities are likely to be quite different thirty years from now, changing even more dramatically than the world of scholarly publishing has changed over the past thirty years. Whether that future scene of scholarship is intellectually vibrant, fostering the free exchange of ideas and enhancement of learning within an economically sustainable framework, depends very much on the thought that we devote right now to that future.
Although appointments to the editorial board have continued with the usual pattern of three every six months, there were no announcements in the preceding double issue on Eighteenth-Century Women and English Catholicism. It is therefore my pleasure to announce nine new board members in this preface. Carolina Alzate is Associate Professor at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, where she was Chair of the Department of Humanities and Literature from 2008 to 2011. She earned her doctorate in Hispanic Literatures from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and her research has focused on nineteenthcentury Colombian narratives, especially on topics relating to nation, gender, autobiography, and literary historiography. She has published several papers and book chapters on these topics and on Colombian writer Soledad Acosta de Samper (1833-1913). She has also led a number of editions of Acosta’s works and critical work about the author, such as Soledad Acosta de Samper: Escritura, género y nación en el siglo XIX (2005; Soledad Acosta de Samper: Writing, gender, and nation in the nineteenth-century). In 2003, she published a novelized biography of Acosta, Soledad Acosta de Samper: Una historia entre buques y montañas (Soledad Acosta de Samper: A story of ships and mountains). She is also the editor of Acosta’s Diario íntimo (2004; Diary) and three of her novels that had appeared only in nineteenth-century periodicals: Laura, Constancia, and Una venganza (A revenge). Her recent publications include the articles “Otra amada y otro paisaje para nuestro siglo XIX: Soledad Acosta de Samper y Eugenio Díaz frente a María” (Beloved women and landscapes in nineteenth-century narrative: Soledad Acosta de Samper and Eugenio Díaz in the perspective of María) in Revista de Lingüística y Literatura (Journal of linguistics and literature); “¿Comunidad de fieles o comunidad de ciudadanos? Dos relatos de viaje del siglo XIX colombiano” (Communities of believers or communities of citizens? Two travel stories of Colombian nineteenth century) in Revista Chilena de Literatura (Chilean journal of literature); and “Modos de la metáfora orientalista en la Hispanoamérica del siglo XIX” (Modes of the Orientalist metaphor in nineteenth-century Hispanic America) in Taller de Letras (Letters workshop).
Kristina Bross is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Purdue University. Her areas of interest include early American literature, particularly exploration and mission writings, transatlantic studies, and gender. She currently is President of the Society of Early Americanists as well as a member of the editorial board of Early American Literature. She is the author of Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America (2004) and coeditor (with Hilary Wyss) of Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology (2008), as well as the author of articles in Early American Literature and in the collections Collaborative Futures: Critical Reflections on Publicly Active Graduate Education (2012); American Christianities: A History of Dominance and Diversity (2011); Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic World (2011); Millenial Thought in America: Historical and Intellectual Contexts, 1630-1860 (2002); and Messy Beginnings: Postcoloniality and Early American Studies (2003). Her awards and fellowships include a Fulbright lectureship in Mainz, Germany, several teaching awards from Purdue University, a Newberry Library Renaissance Consortium Symposium, and both a Humanities Focus grant and a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities. From 2005 to 2008, she was a Service Learning Faculty Fellow at Purdue. She currently is working on a book project entitled “Indies, West and East: Global Currents in Seventeenth- Century English Writing.”
Dorice Williams Elliott is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kansas and was Chair of the Department from 2003 to 2009. A specialist in nineteenth-century British literature, the novel, and women’s literature, she is the author of The Angel out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England (2002). Her articles, which focus on figures such as Sarah Trimmer, Elizabeth Gaskell, Jane Austen, Hannah More, and Sarah Scott, have appeared in venues including Victorian Literature and Culture, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory. She has received awards and fellowships from the Folger Library, the Ford Foundation, and the University of Kansas. Her awards from Kansas include the Shirley Cundiff Haines and Jordan L. Haines Faculty Research Fellowship in English, the Mabel Fry Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching, the W. T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence, and the Hall Center for the Humanities Research Fellowship. Her latest project is a book in progress, “Transporting England: Class, Nation, and Literary Form in Australian Convict Literature.”
Donette A. Francis is Associate Professor of English at the University of Miami, where she specializes in Caribbean literary and intellectual histories, American immigrant literatures, African diaspora literary studies, globalization and transnational feminist studies, and theories of sexuality and citizenship. She is the author of Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature (2010), as well as articles appearing in The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, and Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. She is coeditor of Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, serves on the editorial board of Trotter Review, and she has coedited (with Belinda Edmondson) a special issue of Journal of Transnational American Studies titled “American Studies: The Caribbean Edition” (2013). She has also edited a special issue on “Intellectual Formations” (2013) for the most recent Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal. The recipient of Ford Foundation Summer Fellowships, the Dr. Nuala G. Drescher Award, the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities Faculty Fellowship at Binghamton University, and the Center for Humanities Fellowship at the University of Miami, she is currently writing “The Novel 1960s: Form and Sensibilities in Caribbean Literary Culture,” an intellectual history of the 1960s.
Praseeda Gopinath is Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University, where she also just completed a term as Director of the Honors Program. Specializing in twentieth-century British literature, postcolonial studies, literature of South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, Northern Irish Studies, and gender and sexuality studies, she is the author of Scarecrows of Chivalry: English Masculinities after Empire (2013), as well as articles on topics ranging from Kingsley Amis to masculinity in Hindi cinema in publications including The Blackwell Companion to British Literature, Textual Practice, and Studies in the Novel. At Binghamton she has received several awards and fellowships including an Institute for Advanced Research in the Humanities Fellowship, a Dean’s Research Semester, and a Provost’s Inter/Multidisciplinary Symposia Award. Her current project is a book with the working title “The Indian Gentleman: Masculinities and the Indian Elite.”
Miranda B. Hickman is Associate Professor of English at McGill University in Montréal, Québec. She is author of The Geometry of Modernism: The Vorticist Idiom in Lewis, Pound, H. D., and Yeats (2009), editor of One Must Not Go Altogether with the Tide: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Stanley Nott (2011), and coeditor (with John D. McIntyre) of Rereading the New Criticism (2012). In addition to these book-length projects, she has authored many articles on modernist women writers, especially H. D., in venues including The Blackwell Companion to Modernist Poetry, Vorticism: New Perspectives, The Cambridge Companion to H. D., The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers, Twentieth-Century Literature, and Paideuma. A recipient of McGill’s Noel H. Fieldhouse Award for distinguished teaching and the Carrie M. Derick Award for excellence in graduate teaching and supervision, she has also received several grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her new book-in-progress focuses on women in cultural criticism in interwar Britain.
Christine A. Jones is Associate Professor of French and Head of French Studies at the University of Utah, where she specializes in seventeenth and eighteenth-century France, with particular interest in fairy tales, material culture, and performance. She is the author of Shapely Bodies: The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France (2013), and her articles have appeared in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Eighteenth- Century Fiction, Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. She also has been actively involved in translation for her forthcoming edition of Mother Goose Revisited (2014) and in several contributions to Fairy Tales Framed: Early Forewords, Afterwords, and Critical Words (2012). Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from organizations such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, the French Porcelain Society, and the University of Utah’s Tanner Humanities Center. Her latest project is a book with the working title “An Edible World: Hot Beverages, Orientalism, and the French Enlightenment.” She also is coediting, with Jennifer Shacker, an illustrated young adult volume of animal tales titled “Feathers, Paws, Fins, and Claws: The Extraordinary Animals of Folk and Fairy Tales.”
Roxanne Rimstead is Professor of Comparative Canadian Literature at Université de Sherbrooke in Québec, where she specializes in class and cultural studies, minority writing, feminist criticism, Native literature, autobiography and oral histories, and cultural memory. Author of Remnants of Nation: On Poverty Narratives by Women (2001, winner of the Gabrielle Roy Prize), she has published widely in journals such as Canadian Literature; Essays on Canadian Writing; Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas; Women’s Studies Quarterly; Michigan Feminist Studies Journal; Race, Gender and Class; Surfaces; and Spirale. An early feminist analysis of Emily Carr’s Klee Wyck (1941) won the Don D. Walker Prize from the Western Literature Association. In 2003, she guest edited a special topics issue, “Cultural Memory and Social Identity,” for Essays on Canadian Writing; in 2011, she coedited the issue “Prison Writing/Writing Prison” for Canadian Literature; and in 2009, she created, with graduate students, a book-length website on Culture from Below: http://culture-from-below.recherche.usherbrooke. ca. Since 1995, she has won consecutive research grants and is currently working on a project on precarity and blame in literature. Forthcoming are two coedited collections, Contested Spaces I: Counter-Narratives and Culture from Below and Espaces contestés II: Contre-récits et la culture vue d’en bas.
Victoria Stewart is Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. A specialist in twentieth- century British literature, with a focus on war writing, life writing, and the contemporary novel, she is the author of Women’s Autobiography: War and Trauma (2003), Narratives of Memory: British Writing of the 1940s (2006), and The Second World War in Contemporary British Fiction: Secret Histories (2011). She also has published articles on topics including women writers in middlebrow fiction, Winifred Holby, and Hilary Mantel in Journal of Modern Literature; Clues: A Journal of Detection; Critique, Literature, and History; Modern Fiction Studies; and a wide range of journals and book collections. She is on the editorial board of the Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace monograph series for Pickering and Chatto. Her current project examines the relationship between true-crime narratives and detective fiction in the mid-twentieth century with a focus on Dorothy L. Sayers, Marie Belloc Lowndes, and F. Tennyson Jesse.
As these nine scholars have begun three-year terms on the board, so nine others have cycled off the board at the completion of their terms. I therefore would like to convey my profuse thanks to Julia Abramson, Katherine Adams, Giselle Anatol, Deborah Clarke, Samar Habib, Susannah Mintz, Ellen Rosenman, Angela Sorby, and Chantal Zabus. The journal has benefited greatly from their years of service on the board. I warmly wish them well even as I hope that this is not the end of their connection to Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature.
There is also more news than usual about our office and operations to relate, as we included no such information in the preceding double issue. Most importantly, there are greetings and farewells to convey for several departures and arrivals in the office since the fall of 2011. In the spring of 2012, we said goodbye to Jennifer Fuller when she completed her term as Publicity Manager. Jennifer has since left the University of Tulsa, and for the best of reasons, having completed her doctorate in Victorian literature and taken a position as Assistant Professor at Warner University. In the fall of 2012, we welcomed Ashley Schoppe as the new Publicity Manager and one of our undergraduate students, Zachary Harvat, as a volunteer. We also said farewell to Lexi Stuckey, who completed her term as Book Review Editor in order to focus on finishing her dissertation. For spring 2013, we said welcome to two new interns: Mark Rideout, who has taken a three-semester term as Subscriptions Manager, and Lindi Smith, our new Book Review Editor. This spring would have required a goodbye to Melissa Antonucci as our Subscriptions Manager, except that she generously stayed on for another semester to share work with Lindi as she was introduced to this demanding position.
Finally, I am delighted to welcome two undergraduate interns, Zachary Harvat and Matthew Picht, for the semester. While working for a few hours every week in the office, they are taking an independent study with me on academic publishing and scholarly editing. It is a pleasure to work with them and to have their assistance in the office.
Given the emphasis I placed in this preface on funding scholarly publishing, it is all the more important that I thank the University of Tulsa, especially the Office of the Provost, for supporting Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Thanks apply even more than usual to our Provost Roger Blais for providing us with a second summer intern this year to facilitate our efforts to expedite the journal’s publication schedule. The authors, editors, and readers of academic journals benefit greatly from enlightened administrators who perceive the value of using scholarly publications to integrate a university’s teaching and research missions fully. These benefits redound to the fields of humanistic study and to higher education in ways incremental, subtle, but crucial. I wish all scholarly journals could operate in such settings.
In developing my thoughts on open access, fair use, and scholarly journals I gained much from my participation in “Use It or Lose It: Copyright and Fair Use for Researchers and Scholars,” a Workshop and Public Forum organized by Professor Robert Spoo at the University of Tulsa Law School in February 2013. I also would like to thank my fellow editors in the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, especially Martha J. Cutter and Bonnie Wheeler. I have learned much from discussions on our listserv and in conversations surrounding our MLA convention roundtables and panels. I am grateful to Tom Buoye, Sean Latham, and Adrian Alexander for commenting on a draft of this essay. Given my stress on the labor of editing, I feel it is important to point out that, as usual, Karen Dutoi saved me from the embarrassment of countless errors and stylistic infelicities through her careful copyediting. Any remaining errors are of course my fault.
Laura M. Stevens
University of Tulsa
NOTES
1 “Open Access,” Wikipedia, last modified 13 November 2013, accessed 19 November 2013, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access.
2 Max Planck Gesellschaft, “Berlin Declaration,” Open Access, accessed 19 November 2013, http://openaccess.mpg.de/286432/Berlin-Declaration. The other two major declarations are the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which was developed at a conference convened by the Open Society Institute in 2001, and the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, which was composed during a meeting held by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2003.
3 Kathleen Fitzpatrick provides a lucid explanation and brief history of the open access movement in “Giving it Away: Sharing and the Future of Scholarly Communication,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 43 (2012), 347-62, especially 348- 51. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
4 “Open Access,” PLOS, accessed 19 November 2013, http://www.plos.org/ about/open-access/.
5 Jennifer Crewe, “Scholarly Publishing: Why Our Business is Your Business Too,” Profession (2004), 25.
6 Tim Krieder, “Slaves of the Internet, Unite!” The New York Times, Sunday 21 Review, 27 October 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/opinion/sunday/ slaves-of-the-internet-unite.html.
7 Fitzpatrick cites Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (New York: Hyperion, 2006). Fitzpatrick also makes reference here to Stevan Harnad’s contributions over email to early discussions of open access, as summarized in Ann Shumelda Okerson and James J. O’Donnell, introduction to Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing, ed. Okerson and O’Donnell (Washington, D. C.: Association of Research Libraries 1995), para. 4, http://www.arl.org/sc/subversive/ introduction-2.shtml.
8 On the casualization of academic labor, see Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2008).
9 On the rise of impact studies of scholarship, see Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, “The ‘Impact Factor’ and Selected Issues of Content and Technology in Humanities Scholarship Published Online,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 42 (2008), 70-77.
10 On the crisis on scholarly publishing in the humanities see Judith Ryan, Idelber Avelar, Jennifer Fleissner, David E. Lashmet, J. Hillis Miller, Karen H. Pike, John Sitter, and Lynne Tatlock, MLA Ad Hoc Committee on the Future of Scholarly Publishing, “The Future of Scholarly Publishing,” Profession (2002), 172-86; Mary Waltham, “The Future of Scholarly Journals Publishing Among Social Science and Humanities Associations” (The National Humanities Alliance, 2009), accessed 21 November 2013, http://www.nhalliance.org/bm~doc/hssreport. pdf; and “Journal Identity in the Digital Age: A 2008 CELJ Roundtable,” compiled and edited by Bonnie Wheeler, Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 42 (2008), 45-88. The contributions to this roundtable are by James J. O’Donnell, Alan Rauch, Sheri Spaine Long, Zepetnek, Martha J. Cutter, and Elizabeth W. Brown.
11 Waltham, “The Future,” 5, quoted in Jennifer Howard, “Pricey Cost per Page Hurts Humanities and Social Science Journals,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 1 September 2009, http://chronicle.com/article/Pricey-Cost-per-Page-Hurts/48257/.
12 See also Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
