[Stephen Francoeur (he/him)]

This blog post by library school professor Jeff Pomerantz delves deeply into the the nooks and crannies of the agreement and his effort to negotiate better terms:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pomerantz/blog/2011/06/my-copyfight/

[Beth Evans]

Pomerantz’s decision “to just make our article public” as a google doc highlights one of the drawbacks of new approaches to publication. If the article had been published as originally intended, it would have been part of a theme issue and in the company of related articles. Researchers who might have found the article through an indexing service that indexed the well-known journal would also have benefited from reading the accompanying articles. As a dis-aggregated piece of writing, it can be less useful.

A sad irony of the piece is that Pomerantz admits that had he not had tenure, he would not very likely have taken on this fight. As long as there are newer hires in academe who seek tenure (and many may agree that we want to protect the institution of tenure), there will still be academics not prepared to “Give ‘em hell.”

[Michael Mandiberg (they/them)]

I had a similar experience with a chapter in an edited volume for Routledge, which is Taylor and Francis. In the end, after a *ton* of negotiation, rewriting of agreements, and brinksmanship, we did get the two chapters licensed CC BY-SA. The irony was that the two of us who were negotiating for this were specifically writing about ***open source art practice*** and we kept reminding them how ironic it was that they were asking a bunch of free culture folks to write about open source practice, and then refusing to allow it to happen.

[Author]

Posts