James Hynes

The Thrilla in Manila about the University of Iowa's open access policy continues in the blogosphere, and there's even a bit of backlash against those of us who think it's a bad idea, at least for creative theses. Some folks are using it to beat the usual dead horses, namely that real writers don't come out of the Iowa Writers' Workshop—real writers, apparently, write their books on the dole or while working as a night watchman or when they're not running with the bulls at Pamplona—or that since the majority of poets and even most fiction writers make very little money, if any, off their work, they should be grateful somebody wants to distribute it for free. You can read both of these arguments here, profferred by, of all people, an MFA grad and English professor at Eastern Michigan University. (Solidarity forever, dude!)

A more subtle and well-reasoned, if slightly scary response comes from Peter Suber,  a philosophy professor and an advocate for scholarly open access. Astonishingly, he concedes that "I've never thought about OA [open access] for works of fiction and creative writing submitted for degree requirements in an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) program like the Iowa Writer's Workshop," and even though it's clear to him now that creative writers aren't too happy about it, he still doesn't seem to understand what all the fuss is about. In the same list of bulleted comments, he makes the following, rather mandarin observation:

The fear that OA will disqualify a thesis or dissertation for future publication has been well-studied and laid to rest, at least for non-fiction works of scholarship.  See for example, Gail McMillan, Do ETDs Deter Publishers? [ETD stands for "electronically transmitted dissertation] College and Research Libraries News, June 2001.  But I don't know any studies of the same question for works of fiction and creative writing.  If the student fears are justified, that would be a good reason to modify the Iowa policy:  either to exempt MFA students from the OA requirement, or to require deposit in the Iowa repository with delayed OA.  (In the absence of a study, the two-year delay already available to Iowa students on request seems more than adequate to me.) 

There are two questionable assertions here, one of them a jawdropper. The first, non-jawdropping one is the assertion about the effect of open access on scholarly writing, when Suber says that open access publication doesn't disqualify a scholarly work from future publication. This is manifestly true, but it's also manifestly true that spending the night with a high-priced call girl doesn't technically disqualify you from being, say, the governor of New York. It's just a hell of a disincentive. The fact is, most young academics at least try to publish their dissertations, to make themselves marketable and tenurable, and I'd like to hear what some of them (and not just statistically) think about open access publication helping or hurting their careers. And I'm not even getting into the whole subject of scientific or medical research that may have commercial potential. I may be misremembering this, but didn't the two guys who founded Google come up with the idea for their search engine as grad students? Would they have been happy about publishing their secret formula, or whatever it was, via open access? My guess is that one of their first hires when they started their company was an intellectual property lawyer with the killer instincts of a ninja.

But Suber's jawdropper is his mild, parenthetical remark that, absent a study that proves harm from open access, "the two-year delay already available to Iowa students on request seems more than adequate to me." Really. To use another, admittedly hyperbolic metaphor, this is like saying that until we get the results of a study back proving harm, we can't be absolutely certain that slavery is a bad thing. My point being that an author's copyright is not just a legal one, it's a moral one, it's an—oh, what's the word?--inalienable one. The moment an author commits words to paper, that work is hers, until and unless she says otherwise. Suber's touching respect for statistical studies about the creative rights of authors (and for the life of the mind in general) obscures this fact, and ignores the long, vexing, frustrating history of authors struggling to control their own work.

But to repeat an argument I've already made in an earlier post, let's take my early experience as a published novelist as an example. I wrote the last draft of my first novel, The Wild Colonial Boy, during my first year and a half at the Writers' Workshop, and I sold it during my final semester. Which means that by time I submitted my "thesis" in 1989, that same text was already in production as a novel, which was released the following year. Which, I hear you saying, would have gotten me in under the two-year embargo, if the open access policy had been in effect. But aha, sez I, the paperback of my novel didn't come out until two years after the hardcover, which means that by time my paperback finally came out, the embargo would have expired and my book would have already been available for free on the Internet. No study is going to convince me that open access in that situation wouldn't have done me any harm. And, as I mentioned before, the book remains in print—doesn't sell a lot anymore, I'll confess—and those few remaining new copies already have pretty stiff competition from used and library copies. (Purely parenthetically—and not to open another can of worms—Suber and I would probably agree that copyright ought to end with an author's death, not 75 years after, as it does now.)

But all this brouhaha could be fixed so easily that I'm surprised we're even arguing about it: make the policy voluntary. It's as simple as that. Not only make it voluntary, but make it flexible, so that people could opt in or out as circumstances permit, by which I mean that writers could rescind permission for open access at any time (though as a practical matter, once it's out there on the web, of course, it's probably always going to be out there), or that writers could opt in, years later, if they wanted to, after their books had gone out of print. No one's done a study that I know of (ho ho), but the Writers' Workshop mythology has always been that two-thirds of the folks who go through the program never publish anything. Which means that two thirds of the bound, onion-skin copies of novels, poetry collections, and volumes of short stories weighing down the shelves of Iowa's grad library have only ever been read by the authors, their family and friends, and their thesis advisors (and I wouldn't be too sure about the advisors). Presumably a lot of those people would be perfectly happy to make their work available.

I'd make one other suggestion: include everyone at Iowa, not just the creative writers, in this policy of opting in or out. For the reasons I already mentioned, a scholarly writer may possibly have as much reason to want to deny open access as a creative writer. At any rate, a grad student in microbiology or Russian history obviously has the same rights to his or her work as I do, and forcing them to make it openly accessible is no less objectionable than forcing creative writers to do it. But if they want to, by all means. (Another can'o'worms parenthesis: the idea of open access has a viscerally utopian appeal—who wouldn't want free access to knowledge?—but like most utopians, there's something a little, um, militant about its proponents' advocacy.)

I'll leave the last word to Peter Suber, from his definition of open access (as quoted in the Millions), with italics added by me: "Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder."

Amen, brother.

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