“Profiles in Digital Scholarship & Publishing: Douglas Eyman”

Interview by Elizabeth Barnett | Xchanges 14.1, Spring 2019

Authorship & Audience in a Digital Age

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?

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.

Kairos 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. 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. 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 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 be done with the work. In Kairos, we allow authors to select whatever license that they want to put on the work. We need change in how scholarship works — the kind of change that happened in the music industry when streaming transformed the licensing and payment model for that field entirely.