Looking back at October‘s CIT Infobits, I see an entry abstracting Andrea Foster’s article about the use of Creative Commons licensing in academe. I was curious and checked it out. It’s a pretty short article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a blurb really, and it says nothing new: Creative Commons has existed for a while now, and is catching on very slowly in academic circles.
Sure, no surprise. I know humanist academics who still don’t really use email or the web much, certainly not for research purposes. Inertia (which, to be fair, is mentioned in Foster’s write-up) is a huge part of the academic way of doing things. Even if authors do know their options with regard to copyright, many academic publishers have not yet had time to evolve to the point where they include such licensing in their vision of what publishing is. While not immutable, currently tenure reviews are what they are: people have been talking for a long while about the need to revise that process so that credit may be given for work performed electronically, but that too will take time. In the meantime, authors are often faced with the choice of either publishing their work online under a Creative Commons license, or having it published on paper and acquire the necessary gravitas in the eyes of their employers, but not both. In this case, the choice is clear: print publication takes precedence, especially since print publishers will often allow authors to publish their works online following a specified time period after the print publication comes out.
Not having published a whole lot in print yet, I haven’t looked into the issue too closely. Are any of the established print publishers amenable to working with an author to allow for the release of an article in electronic format, concurrently with the publication date of the print version?
When publishing in smaller print venues I usually specifically tell them that I want to keep the right to publish the piece electronically on my own website. I’ve only once had a journal say no – they were a web-based journal with subscriptions, and asked that I wait four months. Which I agreed to, despite not really liking it.
The first time I signed a professional publnishing contract was for a paper that was at the ACM Hypertext conference in 1999, and so published in their proceedings. Then they demanded that the paper NOT be published anywhere else or even forwarded by email. Horrid. In 2002 they’d changed their standard contract, specifically stating that the author may publish on their own website. Two months ago I signed a standard contract from a library studies journal with a big publishing house, and they had the same kind of line – you can’t publish the exact same text anywhere except on your own website.
All those contracts had things about how you could publish new versions anywhere, and also as book chapters, though I can’t remember whether you were supposed to ask them about republishing in books – there was certainly an idea that that would not be a problem.
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