Getting Your Work Read:
Ethically Circumventing Paywalled Publishing Practices

Cheryl Ball and Douglas Eyman

https://doi.org/10.7940/M329.2.DISPUTATIO.BALL-EYMAN

Cheryl and Doug have been working on what we've been calling "The Kairos Book" for several years, in bits and pieces, starts and re-starts. In 2023, we recorded a series of videos as a kind of oral history of the journal, and we started drafting some of the key issues we wanted to address in a guide to developing and running an online journal. In June of 2023, we started posting about the history of Kairos, the value of open-access publishing, and the history of digital publishing in writing studies at Publishing Digital Scholarship—if you are interested in these topics, you can subscribe to be notified when we publish new posts. We plan to eventually package everything into a coherent whole, aimed at an audience of potential journal publishers and editors in any field, but we realized that some of these topics would be helpful for a broader audience, and, in particular, Kairos readers. Starting with this issue, we will be editing, revising, and re-posting work from PDS here in the Disputatio section. In this first installment, we provide a guide for authors to share their academic work legally and ethically, regardless of where it was first published.

Cheryl explains the exigence for this post:

Every few weeks, a friend will post online about a new article they’ve published, and everyone will be celebratory and congratulatory and hearts and likes abound! The author links to the paywalled journal article, and my emotions run so wild that I have to take a moment to contain myself before responding.

I HATE PAYWALLS. I hated them when I was a faculty member at an institution; I hated them when I worked in an academic library; and I hate them with a vengeance now that I am an independent scholar, unaffiliated with any academic institution or library. It’s been three years since I’ve become unaffiliated, but my hate for paywalls goes back to the beginning of my work with Kairos, in 2001, when I first began to recognize the importance of open-access scholarship in the knowledge distribution system.

I am elated that my friends are getting published. But. And that’s a big but… I have spent the entirety of my academic career promoting open-access publishing and making sure that every scholarly article or webtext I’ve ever published was available in an open-access format. (I also spent many years beating myself up over the closed-access textbooks I author, and I have come to terms with that in a convoluted way that I will save for a different post.)

So when friends publish a closed-access, paywalled article and then link to it, it feels like a personal attack. Which, of course, IT IS NOT. And that’s why it takes me a few minutes to compose myself before I write the following response on pretty much every one of these social media posts:

Congratulations!!! I can’t wait to read this. Have you considered posting an open version of this article to your library’s institutional repository or your personal website? Then I can access it.

It doesn’t surprise me that scholars who have been lucky enough to gain employment with a college or university don’t think about us underemployed or independent scholars who still would like to read their work. And it gets old asking for a PDF directly from the author. That relies on (1) finding and sending an email to the author, and (2) having the author respond with the PDF in a timely manner. Why not just post a version online where ANYONE can download it whenever they’d like? Authors would get a lot more distribution and readership by posting a link to an open-access repository.

...

We know that not everyone has the luxury of submitting work solely in open access publication venues ¹—and sometimes it is appropriate to publish in closed-access/paywalled venues, especially in the case of special issues—but there are ways to share work that has been initially locked behind a paywall. And it is possible for authors to retain some rights to their own work (rather than signing all rights over to the publisher) as we detail below. The first step, though, is to be informed about how these systems work, what your obligations are under copyright law, and to be willing to advocate for rights to your own work.

Keep Your Rights: Using Author Agreements

Author agreements are also sometimes referred to as publishing contracts in scholarly publishing. They outline the terms of publication. In some humanities journals (that’s our focus here, in any case), those agreements are listed on the website and assumed as part of the submission process, but more and more guidelines such as those listed by COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) and DOAJ (Directory of Open-Access Journals) recommend or require these agreements to be spelled out as de facto publishing contracts between authors and publishers. Much like End User License Agreements on software, many authors don't read these contracts very closely (and sometimes editors don’t even read them before asking authors to sign them).

What is the purpose of these agreements? They spell out the rights the publisher and author have with the article in question. These rights include who holds the copyright after publication. Historically, these publishing agreements have required authors to sign over all of their rights to the publisher.

In some cases, this meant that the author no longer retained any rights to their own work including handing out copies in the copy room (yes, we’re talking that long ago), making course packs, putting digital copies on a learning management system for a course, and so on. Prior to the advent of widespread digital publishing in the early 21st century, authors could barely get 20 print copies of their individual article (called off-prints)—much less the entire journal issue—for their own personal and professional purposes. Did you need a print copy of that article from X journal in our field for your tenure file, but the library doesn’t subscribe to it and it isn't available via interlibrary loan? You may be unable to get it. This seems like a problem that has been solved, but we are still hearing about similar cases from recent years, despite the sense that digital copies should make this kind of use relatively easy.

This problem is exacerbated by the difference between independent academic publishers, university presses, and big commercial academic publishers, which are really just another name for large data conglomerates. The latter include multiple-billion-dollar-profit companies such as

• Elsevier, which publishes Computers & Composition,
• Taylor & Francis, which publishes Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Technical Communication Quarterly, as well as the Routledge imprints rhetoricians frequently publish in,
• Sage, which publishes the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and Written Communication,

and others, including Wiley and Springer Publishing, which lean more scientific in their content.

On the other hand, academic journal publishers such as WAC Clearinghouse and independent journals (including Kairos) often allow authors to retain their own copyright. Kairos, for instance, writes in its copyright policy that “We encourage authors to place a Creative Commons license on their work, which allows authors to declare what rights (if any) they are willing to grant to others to make use of their work.”

The first obligation as an author is to read the author agreement offered for your publication. It may already have provisions for archiving or sharing your work. If you have questions about it and you have access to a research library, that library will almost certainly have a librarian who can help you understand it. If you do not have a friendly librarian handy, we find Georgetown University Library's explanation of "Negotiating Your Contract" a good overview of the provisions that may be present in any given contract.

As of 2024, some journal publication agreements will allow an author to self-archive a version of their work. The contract may specify that the version be a pre-print (that is, a version that has not been copyedited and set in the final journal design by the publisher), in rare occasions, the agreement will allow the author to post the final published version to their own personal website. One way to examine publisher agreements is to use the JISC Open Policy Finder, which provides an overview of available contract options and links to the relevant information on the publisher's website. Using this took, for example, we were able to find Elsevier's policies on article sharing, which are fairly permissive.

Sharing provisions are very rare in agreements for chapters in edited collections or for whole books, so for journal and book publishers that do not offer permissive licenses or proffer overly restrictive contracts, we recommend using the SPARC Author Addendum, which is designed to allow authors to retain the rights to their intellectual property, in the following clause:

4. Author’s Retention of Rights. Notwithstanding any terms in the Publication Agreement to the contrary, AUTHOR and PUBLISHER agree that in addition to any rights under copyright retained by Author in the Publication Agreement, Author retains: (i) the rights to reproduce, to distribute, to publicly perform, and to publicly display the Article in any medium for non- commercial purposes; (ii) the right to prepare derivative works from the Article; and (iii) the right to authorize others to make any non-commercial use of the Article so long as Author receives credit as author and the journal in which the Article has been published is cited as the source of first publication of the Article. For example, Author may make and distribute copies in the course of teaching and research and may post the Article on personal or institutional Web sites and in other open-access digital repositories.

What does this mean? When you publish with a publisher that wants you to sign over your rights (including Elsevier, Sage, Wiley, and some society publishers in rhet/comp), you have the option to say “NO, THANK YOU” and offer them an alternative by signing and sending this SPARC addendum, which allows you to keep your copyright and give them all the rights they need to copyedit, publish, and make some money from your work. You’re essentially giving them rights to make money on your work while you keep your intellectual rights to nearly anything you want with your own work after that, including posting it free-of-charge on your personal or library repository. Most of the editors in our field are receptive to accepting this alternate copyright agreement, and some of the large publishers, like Elsevier, have agreed to its use when presented by an author.

SPARC stands for Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, which is a non-profit organization that "supports systems for research and education that are open by default and equitable by design." The SPARC Author Addendum has been in use since 2006—and Cheryl and Doug have both used this addendum when publishing their own work (and are also big fans of SPARC for the work that they do!).

Publish Your Own Work: Open Repositories

The core principle of open repositories is that they are open—they allow access to scholarship to anyone on the web. While there are several kinds of open repositories, for our purposes here, we will narrow the discussion to two options: institutional repositories and personal websites. We could also include disciplinary repositories, but until very recently, we didn’t have any viable options in our field.

Institutional Repositories

In terms of scholarly publishing, repositories have generally been the domain of academic libraries—institutional repositories (IRs) are how libraries figured out how to circumvent the commercial data conglomerates and preserve institutionally specific publications, such as Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). (Read more about the history of IRs in terms of library publishing in the Library Publishing Curriculum’s Introduction module, Ball et al., 2024). More recently, those preservation efforts have turned to new scholarly content that includes institutionally home-grown scholarly journals (in PDF format, mostly) and open educational resources (in the form of PDF-based textbooks).

Institutional repositories are not only available at research universities—many (but not all) colleges and universities have an institutional repository. For instance, one of the most well-known IRs that archives and makes available scholarly student journals exists at a small liberal arts college (SLAC), Illinois Wesleyan University. However, faculty are often not aware that such repositories are available and that they can make use of them—so we strongly recommend making friends with your local librarians and asking about whether your institution has an IR. If your institution does not, or you don't have an institution, your personal website can serve as your own personal repository (more on that below).

If your school has an institutional repository, your librarians want you to upload your scholarly content—of any type: articles, books, proceedings, chapters, slidedecks from conferences or teaching, OERs, syllabi, and so forth—for free use by anyone around the world. And most of these platforms have maps and download counts for you to keep track of who is reading your work and what country they are from. Refer to Figure 1 for the reader distribution map of a portion of Cheryl’s free scholarly content uploaded to IRs at West Virginia University (Bad Ideas About Writing) and Wayne State University (a white paper on creating preservable digital humanities content). If you need a better moral reason for making your content freely accessible to anyone in the world with Internet access, Cheryl can go into a long diatribe about equity and knowledge justice in underresourced places in the world (but we'll save that for a future post).

How do you know if your university has an institutional repository? Ask your scholarly communications librarian. Those titles aren’t consistent across universities though, so here’s a list of job titles to search for on your university library website:

• Scholarly communications librarian
• Digital publishing librarian
• Open publishing librarian
• Open data librarian
• Open educational resources (OER) librarian
• Copyright librarian
• Open repository librarian
• Scholarly publishing librarian
• Repository librarian
• Digital services librarian
• Publishing services (librarian)
• Data services librarian
• Editorial coordinator
• Library publishing coordinator
• Open publishing
• Open scholarship
• Intellectual property librarian
• Data services

Or just search for "Digital Commons," which is what bepress calls its IR, which is used by many libraries. Once you identify whether your university has an IR, your librarian will get you set up with an account and help you upload as much of your scholarship that you want to that free, open, preservable, accountable website. (Make sure to sign up for and use your ORCID—especially if you have changed names or institutions during your career! It’s a MUST!)

Your Personal Academic Website

If you search and can’t find an IR at your institution, you can always post your scholarly work to your personal/academic website. It is, after all, your own personal repository. This is what Cheryl did for decades, and used her personal website as a tenure portfolio on multiple occasions.² FN This website has literally everything Cheryl has ever published on it, in some form—whether it’s

• a pre-print (the pre-copyedited version of a published article/chapter),
• a proof copy (the post-copy-edited version, but still with existing errors), or
• the published version.

The version is dependent on the author agreement she signed with the publisher.

Other Repositories

Whatever you do, DO NOT use academia.edu or Researchgate. Those sites steal your data. (As do most of the sites we interact with on the Web these days, but these two in particular require logins for others to even access your work. They’re prevalent in other parts of the world, especially Europe, but frankly using an IR or your personal website is a much better, less-stealing-your-data method of getting your work read in the world.)

Finally, only within the last few years have we had a decent and stable disciplinary repository in writing studies. The humanities now has a fantastic repository in which you can (1) store all of your research content, (2) create a personal/academic website that features any of your scholarly work and work-in-progress, and (3) de facto allows you to retain your copyright interests in your own work. You can also connect with other scholars in areas of interest to you through the site. What we have known for almost a decade as MLA Commons, and then Humanities Commons, has now rebranded again under a much-larger umbrella called Knowledge Commons, which has just announced they’re the official repository for the National Endowment for the Humanities! That’s utterly amazing and an important aspect to preserving our research for the (un)foreseeable future.

Knowledge Commons (KC) is an open-source (meaning the code base is open for free use), open-access (meaning there is no paywall to access work in KC), non-profit, academy-owned repository, and it is probably THE best solution to storing your work for the long-term, in a single place. It is run by a fantastic team (first at Modern Language Association, and now at Michigan State University, led in both places consecutively by Dr. Kathleen Fitzpatrick). Please check it out!

Recommendations

If you want to share your work in the widest way possible, we recommend the following, in order of effectiveness (not mutually exclusive of course):

1. Choose open-access publishing venues.
2. Read and understand your author agreements.
3. Use the SPARC Author Addendum to keep rights to your own work.
4. Upload your scholarship to a repository (institutional, personal, or disciplinary).

Reference

Ball, Cheryl E.; Inefuku, Harrison; Meetz, Johanna; Neds-Fox, Joshua; Raju, Reggie; Rosa, Célia Regina de Oliveira; Rowell, Chelcie; Shuttleworth, Kate; Warren, John; & Wipperman, Sarah. (2024). Library Publishing Curriculum Introduction module: Introduction narrative. Library Publishing Curriculum, 2 (1). https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/libpubcurriculum/vol2/iss1/1

Footnotes

1. Keep in mind that Cheryl is writing from the perspective of having gotten tenure at two institutions (R2 and R1) using research that was overwhelmingly published in open-access and copyleft venues, including work that was essentially self-published as an open educational resource (OER). So feel free to come at her with your reservations so she can help you flip your script, because it can be done. ↵


2. Note that Cheryl stopped maintaining her website when she left tenure-track life in 2017 and ditched the usable design in 2022 when she left employment in academia. You can still find all her scholarship there; it just takes some digging. ↵