"Profiles in Digital Scholarship & Publishing: Douglas Eyman"

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About the Interviewee

Douglas Eyman is Associate Professor of English and the Director of graduate
programs in Writing and Rhetoric at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
His latest books are Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice and Play/Write:
Digital Rhetoric, Writing, Games. Dr. Eyman is also the senior editor and
publisher of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, one of the longest running, continuously published digital scholarly journals in the world.

About the Interviewer

Elizabeth Barnett is an MA candidate in Rhetoric and Writing in the University of New Mexico's Department of English Language and Literature. Her interests lie in the pedagogy of multimodal digital composition and technical writing. 

Contents

Digital Rhetoric: Expanding Definitions

The Human in the Machine

Digital Rhetoric In the Classroom

Sustainability in the Digital Realm

Authorship & Audience in A Digital Age

Future Work: A Theory of Digital Rhetoric

Xchanges: In your book Digital Rhetoric, you wrote, “In a future edition of the digital text, I hope to implement a ‘remix engine’—a system that will allow readers to pull elements from the book, edit them, rearrange them, add additional content, and share the results with others.” This invitation to collaboration seems like it fundamentally changes our traditional notions of authorship, copyrights, and plagiarism.

How do you see the future of authorship or ownership of digital work taking shape? What do you hope happens for authors and audiences in this new world? Is this even a concern for you? Why or why not?

DE: That's a pretty big question. First, I would say we need to separate the idea of scholarly production from creative production. Scholarly production is typically produced by people who are being paid to do that work. Also, I think the majority of scholars don't make money off of their books, and certainly, nobody makes money off of articles. The journal and book publishers make money. There's a kind of embedded system that produces a great amount of profit off of the work. The journal provides editorial services, publication, and distribution. Those things aren't free.

Kairos (http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/) is interesting because we have an economic model that relies almost entirely on volunteer labor and volunteer donations from the editors to run the thing. We don't have any income. It's a model that is completely unsustainable and unrepeatable for other systems. We've managed to make it sustainable thus far because it has value to the field, to the discipline.

So, you always have to have systems that are paid for in some way. The big problem that we have with publishing right now is that most of those systems are skewed toward providing massive profits to these very large corporations that are really not providing as much of their digital platforms as that profit would indicate. It would be really nice to have a lot more open access venues, but even open access venues have to have some form of infrastructure that's paid for. The idea that everything is to be free is fake. We should be careful not to say things like, "Any open access publisher that charges publication fees of authors is automatically predatory." This is not the case. There are plenty of open access journals that require authors to pay to publish because that's the way that they create and fund the infrastructure. I would encourage people to examine and explore new models and see if there are different ways of doing it.

I will say that copyright, as it's currently being used, tends to be an economic exchange: scholars exchange their copyright for the privilege of being published, and the publishers then own the work. More publishers are allowing people to put Creative Commons licenses on their work, which is what we use with Kairos. The nice thing about Creative Commons licensing is that it allows for the author to decide what can you do with the work. The license can be really restrictive or it can be really wide open or anything specified in between. This is a little bit of a problem for us right now because the Directory of Open Access Journals (https://doaj.org/) has a new requirement that all its listed journals put the least restrictive license on all of the things that are published. That to me works against the ethic that I believe that the author should have control over what anyone else can do with it. In Kairos, we allow authors to select whatever license that they want to put on the work, but because we do that, we're not going to be listed in the DOAJ anymore even though we meet all their other criteria.

I think this is like the Internet Archive's choice to follow robots.txt files retroactively. I think there's a philosophical reason for following these processes and practices that the Internet Archive follows and the DOAJ follows, but I think they work against what we want to happen for scholars. The task is to move publishing systems to accept this broader continuum of copyright possibilities.

Despite my desires to make an updatable, remixable kind of text with my book, the University of Michigan Press didn't want to build the infrastructure for that. There were some complications with a press creating something that allows people to remix. They also have a bit more control over the copyright than I would have liked. I had somebody come to me who wanted to translate the book into Spanish, but the copyright is owned by the University of Michigan Press. The Press’ response was, "Find a publisher in South America that deals with Spanish language work, have them buy the copyright from us, and then they'll publish it." We still have to use print-based publishing mechanisms even for digital projects. That makes sense because a print model is much more structured and controlled commercially. Everybody has wrestled with that. The music industry has wrestled with that too. How do you allow people to just pick and choose what they want and be able to download it and stream it? The licensing for that and the payment model for that has completely changed the way the industry works. We need change like that in how scholarship works.