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The public domain

The documents that underlie the vast majority of Rotunda Press’s publications (both historical and literary) are squarely in the public domain, and there is a powerful argument for a freely available, indexed, searchable version of those documents, especially in light of the fact that in many cases federal money was used to help to support the works in the first place. Recently, the Office of Science and Technology Policy asked for comment on proposals that works supported by federal money should be made openly accessible. The emphasis of the OSTP query and related efforts has been on the scientific journal literature, but exactly the same public policy case can be made for the humanistic book literature. See (External Link) . Additionally, a roundtable convened by the House Science and Technology Committee, consisting of publishers, librarians (including me) and provosts has also endorsed the principle that published articles based on federally funded works be made open access after (at most) a brief embargo period following publishing. Again, the logic applies just as well to other forms of federally funded scholarship. The report, statements by the two members not endorsing the report in full, as well as Roundtable member biographies, the House Science and Technology Committee’s charge to the group, and related material can be found at (External Link) . To its credit, Rotunda is working with federal agencies to create such a resource for the founding documents, but in the meantime, with some exceptions, these out-of-copyright works are behind a pay wall, and a pretty high one at that.

The logic of open access for scholarly work extends well beyond works in the public domain and works funded by government, and is an instance of a standard economic argument regarding the production and pricing of public goods. The classic statement is by Paul A. Samuelson, The pure theory of public expenditure,” The Review of Economics and Statistics , 36 .4: 387-389. (1954) The best statement of this argument as applied to the products of scholarship was made by the builder of the Rotunda himself, Thomas Jefferson. It is often quoted, and yet still bears repeating:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 13 August 1813, The Founders’ Constitution Volume 3, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8, Document 12 (External Link) The University of Chicago Press, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson . Edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh. 20 vols. Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1905.

Which is to say, the ideal price for scholarly work is zero. Of course, there remains the minor detail of paying to create and produce the work. This is not the place to take on the economics of scholarly publishing, but I note that the money now spent by academic institutions and their supporters is sufficient to provide for the production and distribution of the scholarship currently published. It would thus be technically and economically possible to organize a system in which the costs of publication and distribution were prepaid, presumably from library budgets, and the works were then distributed free of charge. The net effect on library budgets would be either zero or somewhat positive. But I digress. One could also argue that copyright protection should not apply to scholarly work at all, because scholars do not write for money derived from sales of scholarly works, but rather seek to have their work widely read. Thus, elimination of copyright for scholarly work would have no detrimental effect on the volume or quality of published scholarship. See Steven Shavell, “Should Copyright of Academic Works be Abolished?” The Journal of Legal Analysis , Forthcoming; Harvard Law and Economics Discussion Paper No. 655; Harvard Public Law Working Paper No. 10-10. Available at SSRN: (External Link) .

The library, the publisher, and perpetual stewardship

The problem faced by Rotunda Press in providing perpetual stewardship is exemplary of a problem faced by all digital scholarship. Analyzed carefully, the differences between perpetual stewardship of print works and electronic ones are mostly (but not entirely) illusory. Stewardship requires the provision of ongoing resources, and it is expensive. Because libraries have much more experience with this kind of stewardship—with taking responsibility for providing permanent access to the published scholarly record and associated source material, I am persuaded (and would like to persuade readers of these comments) that academic libraries are best suited to take on the task of preservation of electronic publications—be they relatively simple or complicated—produced by academic publishers. Rotunda Press, which has done an excellent job, is far too small to exhaust scale economies associated with digital preservation. For this reason and for reasons of branding and visibility, they have limited their range of content to a few areas.

The separation of stewardship from direct provision of access adds an unnecessary and complicating layer to the ecosystem of scholarly publishing. As an alternative, the Press could be a quasi-independent element of an academic library, responsible for its own editorial functions, but relying on the library for provision of the perpetual stewardship that electronic publication requires, and using the library “brand” to advertise its ability to provide such stewardship. Such an arrangement would be efficient in the simplest sense: neither the library nor the publisher would be required to learn how to do things that are not already part of its natural compass of activity.

Let publishers make things public and let librarians preserve them and assure permanent access. I’m a great believer in market transactions and division of labor. But taking the preservation function from the library and giving it to the publisher, who then must preserve and make accessible works that are licensed back to libraries, is not efficient. Rather, it is an unexamined natural consequence of extending a print model to digital technologies, and it would behoove us to consider rearranging our institutions to the job more reliably, less expensively, and less painfully, and with explicit recognition (which the libraries have, and the publishers often do not) of the broad public and scholarly value derived from digital scholarship. The result should be more and better books.

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Source:  OpenStax, Online humanities scholarship: the shape of things to come. OpenStax CNX. May 08, 2010 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11199/1.1
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