On Intellectuals Without Property
Kurt Jonassohn
June 1999
The following contribution to the contemporary debate about intellectual property is being written by a retired academic who is still engaged in research and writing. This introductory statement is meant to explain why I am not concerned with the platitudinous ‘publish or perish’ advice. My formal career is finished and whatever I do now serves to please me rather than personnel committees and deans. This freedom to work on whatever happens to strike me as intriguing is greatly envied by younger colleagues and gives them a reason for looking forward to their own retirement.
That freedom to work without regard to organizational and bureaucratic restraints does have its own drawbacks. As a retiree I have no claim on the kinds of support that are available to full-time faculty members.Such requirements as research assistants, office and computer supplies,photocopying, etc. are only rarely available to retirees. Of course, the financial difficulties that universities are exposed to have restricted such benefits to everybody, with the possible exception of administrators. However, the bottom line is that scholars, especially after retirement, have to finance the costs of their intellectual production from their own resources.
Now, one may feel justified in supposing that the results of such investment of time and resources would confer ownership rights on the person who produced such results. Yes, when you write up the results you certainly own them. But you can’t publish them without giving up this right to your own property. Journal editors and book publishers almost uniformly make it a condition of publication that you cede to them the copyright to your work. Some of them have even been known to be so uncouth as to deny an author the right to the further use of his/her own work. It has also been known for the holders of the copyright to use it without informing the author. Thus, I have stumbled across an interesting book in the library that, to my surprise, contained a chapter by me although I had never been contacted by the original publisher or the editor of this new volume. Not only are authors completely disenfranchised, they are also being exploited. To talk about intellectual property in such a context is a bitter farce.
To add insult to injury, there are to my knowledge no journals that will pay an author for acquiring and publishing his property. However, there are journals who extract fees from the author for publication and for reprints. The career contingencies in academia being what they have become, younger authors are only too willing to go along with these conditions just to get their work into print. The situation for publishing a book is much the same. Some publishers pay no royalties at all. Others will publish only if the author is willing to underwrite the cost of publication. Still others will offer to pay royalties. But a scholarly book has to be really successful to produce enough royalties to even cover the author’s costs.
In addition to these barriers to publication, authors have to deal with editors. These are of two kinds and it seems a pity that they are both described by the same noun. The first kind of editors is usually appreciated by authors because they clean up a manuscript, suggest improvements, polish the English, and impose the house style. They tend to labour anonymously unless an author acknowledges their contribution. The second kind of editor is a different species because they reap public recognition without having produced any intellectual property. The editors of journals in the best case impose a particular style on their publication; in the worst case they implement and supervise a bureaucratic apparatus for the handling of manuscripts. In either case, their name figures prominently in each issue of their journal. A similar role is played by editors of books. In the best case, they produce a volume whose contributors demonstrate some expertise in an aspect of a well-defined topic, prefaced by the editor’s thoughtful introduction. In the worst case, the editor has simply performed the clerical tasks required to put some vaguely related contributions between covers -- sometimes without adding any introduction at all. In either case, the editor’s name is prominently displayed on the title page of the book while the contributors are mentioned in the table of contents and usually are not even entitled to a part of the royalties. This second type of editors has created academic careers that are bolstered by lengthy lists of ‘publications’ for people who have never ‘produced’ any intellectual output.
One may wonder why this second kind of editor came to exist and survive. One answer lies in the symbiotic relationship between those who build their career on administrative and bureaucratic skills and those who write in order to maintain their career in a publish and perish environment. This also explains the relationship between the increasing number of academics and the increasing number of journals and edited books. Thus, these two kinds of skills complement each other in bolstering academic careers. The resulting explosion of publications will continue until the parameters of scholarly careers are redefined.
All of this may happen to those lucky colleagues who manage to get published. A much larger group have their efforts rejected by editors who may not even have read their manuscript. This may harm their individual careers, but the much greater harm is to their public which may be deprived of interesting contributions. In this sense, editors perform a screening (= censuring) function. That they are not always very good at this can be easily documented by the number of significant contributions that have been honoured by rejection letters.
Enter technology! First we got the computer with word processing software that made writing and revising much easier. Then, and much more important in the present context, we got the world wide web that eliminated the need for editors and publishers altogether. This made it possible to publish manuscripts without restrictions and at relatively modest cost. It is too soon to tell how personnel committees and deans will deal with that kind of publication. But at least the author retains the rights to his/her intellectual property. An additional advantage will be the increase in readership. Since many of us write in order to communicate that is not a trivial consideration. Early indications are that work published on the internet attracts a much larger audience than the printed word.
This is one of the reasons we started this web site for the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies. The question of copyright and payment promptly came up in connection with the establishment of this web site. But we are still mainly interested in communicating and exploring the possibilities of this new medium of publication. The Internet has many features that may in the future be perceived as a publishing revolution as great as the invention of the printing press. The web is rapidly becoming a cheap and efficient way of making intellectual output available to a wide audience. It does so while also avoiding all forms of control from editors’ opinions to outright censorship. Even more important, it eliminates the time delays imposed by conventional publishing, which is particularly important when dealing with contemporary issues. These advantages far outweigh the disadvantages and abuses that are also part of this new system of communicating.
For MIGS we have resolved the questions of copyright and payment by not charging for materials published on our web site. Our ‘visitors’ should feel free to read and download any part of it -- which they are probably doing in any case. However, we insist that all of the materials we publish are copyrighted either by their author or by MIGS. This, in practice, simply means that use for commercial purposes requires permission while use for non-commercial purposes requires only a footnote acknowledging the source.
