"Profiles in Digital Scholarship & Publishing: Cheryl Ball"

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About the Interviewee

Cheryl Ball is the director of the Digital Publishing Collaborative at Wayne State University Libraries. Since 2006, Ball has been editor of the online, peer-reviewed, open-access journal Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy which is the longest continuously publishing digital journal focusing exclusively on digital media scholarship. She is also the project director for Vega, an open-access, multimedia academic publishing platform due to be released in 2019. Ball also serves as the executive director of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

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

An Evolution of Scholarly Multimedia

Teaching Decoloniality & Multimodality

The Rigor of Digital Scholarship

Issues in Open Access

Toward a True OA Publishing Platform: Vega

Issues in Open Access

Xchanges: There has always been controversy about writers, poets, and artists and their commercial value. As the entire ecosystem of publishing migrates online, more and more venues are disappearing behind paywalls. 

How do you see this mass migration playing out for the future of writing studies and digital scholarly work? What are our obligations to authors? To audiences?

CB: I have this big match that I like to light on Facebook about once every six months about how evil and terrible the commercial publishers are. Of course, not every commercial publisher is the same. There are some commercial publishers that are non-profit and there are some that are massively corporatized. Then there's the need for junior scholars to get tenure. The biggest issue that we face right now when it comes to dealing with commercial publishers in our discipline is that they will publish anything. The production quality has really gone down, which is true of almost all the commercial publishers. They're doing a lot of outsourcing. They're also doing a lot of copyediting through AI, which is cool on the one hand, but on the other hand can lead you to problems. Then my real problem with these publishers is that they charge so much for those books, like a 180-page monograph or edited collection, and it's going to cost $250. That's the individual price, not institutional price, because, of course, institutions have to pay five times that.

There's this whole process of unbundling that's happening now through this international initiative called OA, Open Access, OA 2020. Wayne State happens to be a U.S. signatory on that and a lot of the universities in Europe have signed it already, because there's a European mandate now for open-access scholarship, called Plan S. It's this brand-new thing. It's mandating that all scholarly communication, including monographs, be open access by 2027. I want to just allow scholars to publish what they need to publish, when they need to publish it. Our tenure requirements are way too high most places and that's a different conversation. That's how I feel about paywalls. Just break them all down.

Xchanges: There is also controversy about open source regarding authorship, copyrights, collaboration, and remixing. 

Is it fair to allow anyone and everyone to remix or raid digital texts/content for their own purposes? In the best of all possible digital worlds, what do you hope happens for authors and audiences in this new world?

CB: Our work as scholars requires us to remix content every day, all day long. That's what we do when we're putting sources into conversation with each other when we're citing things and when we're producing our own research. That's everything that a lit review is. It is remixing someone else's work, multiple other people's work to provide a foundation and support for our own argument that is born out of that pre-existing conversation. We need to remove the stigma that there is any sort of wrongness to that, whether we're talking about print scholarship or whether we're talking about our digital media scholarship. I wish a better mechanism for downloading and remixing digital assets existed. We're still working on those technologies, I think.

At Kairos, we are very generous in our fair use policies when it comes to authors remixing other authors’ work. We can put clips of videos, or audio, or images and have authors present those in a way that helps facilitate their rhetorical argument, without worrying about the commercial and marketing aspects of copyright law. We also ask authors to consider not just using traditional copyright, because anytime they publish something for us, authors retain copyright, if they publish at Kairos.

Kairos, though, allows authors to keep their copyright, and we encourage them to assign a Creative Commons (CC) License to their work. If they want to get into the key repository of open access journals, the Directory of Open Access Journals (https://doaj.org/), the CC license is required. CC license just means that you can reuse and remix and take that piece and do whatever the heck you want with it, in full as a complete piece, as long as you attribute it back to the original author. And isn't that what we want people to do with our work once we publish it? This is scholarship; this is not trade publishing. This is not your lovingly crafted book of poetry. This is not your short stories. This is not your artwork. This is your scholarly work that you are already paid to do as part of your job.