Open Access News

Andrea Foster, U. of Iowa Writing Students Revolt Against a Plan They Say Would Give Away Their Work on the Web, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 13, 2008 (accessible only to subscribers).

Graduate students in the University of Iowa's writing programs are up in arms. A new university procedure, they fear, will make their novels, plays, and other creative works "done as dissertations" freely available on the Web. That could undermine the commercial value and possibly embarrass the authors, they charge.

Some students, alumni, and professors in Iowa's nonfiction-writing program, playwrights' workshop, translation program, and the renowned writers' workshop typically try to market their theses "­in original or modified forms" to editors, agents, and publishers. If the manuscripts are already on the Web, no one will want to publish the works, the students say....

At the center of the conflict is a routine form that students and their faculty advisers sign for depositing students' theses with the Graduate College. Language added to the form this semester says that the University of Iowa Library will scan hard-copy theses and "make them open-access documents," which it defines as freely available over the Internet and retrievable "via search engines such as Google." ...

Students can request to have Internet publishing delayed for two years, the form states, but it adds that the default assumption is that students want their theses disseminated online. All graduate students must sign the form, due in early April, in order to graduate....

[Nicholas Kowalczyk] and nine other graduate students in the nonfiction-writing program sent an e-mail message this week to all university students on track to earn master-of-fine-arts degrees. The message urged students to send e-mail messages to the president of the university's Graduate Student Senate to complain about the new form....

The controversy has hit the blogosphere. James Hynes, a novelist who graduated from a writing program at Iowa, said on his blog on Tuesday that the new form alarmed him because creative works are fundamentally different from dissertations in the sciences or related fields.

"For those who are writing or have written scholarly dissertations, this may not be a bad thing," he wrote, "but for those of us who graduated from the writers' workshop or one of the other creative-writing programs at Iowa, it's pretty infuriating." ...

Also see C. Max Magee, Thorny Technology: Open Access Causes Problems at the Iowa Writers Workshop, The Millions, March 13, 2008.  Excerpt:

...[The Iowa OA policy would apply to] MFA theses, which, according to our own Workshop grad Edan, might typically consist of a "book-length manuscript... poems, short stories or a novel (either completed or partially completed)." She added, "I turned in a bunch of stories, and I might not have included a couple if I knew they would be made public online...they were experiments more than anything, writing by a student." ...

As is so often the case with these thorny technology issues, however, we should take care not to paint the situation with too broad a brush, otherwise we run the risk of sounding shrill and out of touch, while progress marches inexorably onward....

In academic communities, Open Access has potentially huge importance, allowing scientists and scholars to easily gain access to the work of their colleagues. After all, scholarship in nearly all fields is built upon the work of scholars that went before.

Of course, the Iowa writers are arguing, with creative work, the calculation is different. Writers learn from reading other writers, but a novel doesn't cite previous novels explicitly. Ernest Hemingway doesn't direct his readers via footnote to Sherwood Anderson, for example. And so, the Open Access framework would appear to be flawed when it comes to theses produced by the students in the Iowa Writers Workshop, as it is both irrelevant to their discipline and potentially damaging to their future careers.

At the same time, it would seem to me that the Iowa Writers Workshop, and any MFA programs that follow the same practice, do their students a disservice by deciding to call their students' culminating works, "graduate theses." In the academic world, terms like this have concrete meanings, and there are - sometimes unwritten - rules that govern their usage. Perhaps it would be too much too suggest that calling the final projects of MFAs "theses" is overcompensation by programs that have an inferiority complex when compared to the more grounded academic disciplines, but Iowa and other programs should be aware of these rules in the first place....

Comments

• I defend OA for electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) and even argue that universities should mandate OA for ETDs.  On the other hand, my arguments focus on non-fiction works of scholarship in the sciences and humanities.  I've never thought about OA for works of fiction and creative writing submitted for degree requirements in an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) program like the Iowa Writer's Workshop.  I suspect that many universities with OA policies for ETDs haven't either.
• However, in my argument for mandating OA for ETDs, I make a point of adding that "[g]rad students who have good reasons to be exempt from the mandate should be exempted, not coerced."
• BTW, when the University of Iowa's Graduate Student Senate unanimously adopted a resolution in support of OA two years ago (March 22, 2006), it didn't distinguish non-fiction scholarship from creative writing either.  Some of its statements could easily apply to both:  The Student Senate "[e]ncourages higher education to support these changes through...reward mechanisms, and by providing incentives and support for those advancing alternative models."
• The fear that OA will disqualify a thesis or dissertation for future publication has been well-studied and laid to rest, at least for non-fiction works of scholarship.  See for example, Gail McMillan, Do ETDs Deter Publishers? College and Research Libraries News, June 2001.  But I don't know any studies of the same question for works of fiction and creative writing.  If the student fears are justified, that would be a good reason to modify the Iowa policy:  either to exempt MFA students from the OA requirement, or to require deposit in the Iowa repository with delayed OA.  (In the absence of a study, the two-year delay already available to Iowa students on request seems more than adequate to me.)
• While I might buy the "reduced-odds-of-publication" argument for creative writing, I don't buy the embarrassment argument.  Any kind of work, fiction or non-fiction, can embarrass its author years later.  Students aiming for a master's or doctoral degree should submit work of publishable quality, and faculty should expect work of publishable quality.   The risk of future embarrassment is part of the game, just as (for non-fiction scholarship) the risk of disagreement from others in the field is part of the game. 
• Moreover, as I argued in my earlier article on OA for ETDs, this risk is a legitimate goad to produce good work:  "All teachers know that students work harder and do better work when they know they are writing for a real audience --large or small-- beyond the teacher....OA gives authors a real audience beyond the dissertation committee and real incentives to do original, impressive work...."  I'd be suspicious of any university that said a work was good enough to earn a graduate degree but not good enough to disseminate without embarrassing the author.
• Some of the blog protests of the Iowa policy are over the top.   For example, Grendel writes, "It seems the UI means to place some deal with Google above the interests of its own students....You can't just hold someone's degree hostage until they agree to your sketchy deal with a big corporation."  Like other schools that require OA for ETDs, Iowa wants the good work it nurtures to be widely available to others who can use or build on it.  Google is one of many means to make OA work visible, and Google indexing does not require any kind of "deal" with the university.  Iowa's motivation is the standard and commendable academic motivation to share knowledge, not to profit at the expense of students or even to profit at all.  There may be reasons to rethink the policy for MFA theses.  But let's keep the conversation on track.

Update (3/14/08).  Today's blogosphere is full of comments on the Iowa policy.  Most criticize it.  Some criticize it as applied to creative writing theses but support it for non-fiction works of scholarship, and some fail to draw this distinction.  Some attribute dark motives to the university.  Some repeat the embarrassing "embarrassment" argument.  Some stick to the argument that OA may reduce the chances of future publication.  As I said yesterday, I'm open to persuasion on the last point, and looking for evidence pro or con.  Unfortunately, while many of the new blog posts repeat the dire prediction, none points to evidence. 

Update (3/14/08).  The University of Central Florida is another school that mandates OA for theses and dissertations.  But it may allow a five-year delay before the OA edition is released, in contrast with the two-year delay allowed at Iowa.  Melissa Patterson's article in the Central Florida Future (thanks to Gavin Baker) doesn't say whether the new embargo would only apply to creative writing ETDs or to all ETDs. 

Update (3/15/08).  Several bloggers (1, 2, 3) have criticized my suggestion that a two year embargo might be adequate for works of creative writing.  They might be right. 

Update (3/19/08).  I've been traveling and therefore am late to blog this important update.  Iowa's interim provost, Lola Lopes, released a statement (March 17) explaining that UI has not adopted the controversial policy.  Excerpt:

In recent days a number of people have been upset about what they believed was a plan by our library to publish the creative thesis work of students in our writing programs on the Internet without their permission. Let me say as simply and clearly as I can, there is no such plan nor will there be. I regret sincerely that we did not convey this message when students and faculty first voiced their concerns.

For some time now our library, like most major academic research libraries, has been exploring ways to make its collections more accessible by digitizing some materials. As part of that process, there has been discussion about the possibility of making graduate student dissertations and theses available in electronic format. But any such process must be preceded by developing policies and procedures that allow authors to decide whether and when to allow distribution....

Also see Andrea Foster, U. of Iowa Reverses New Policy That Would Have Made Nearly All Theses Freely Available Online, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 18, 2008 (accessible only to subscribers).  Excerpt:

..."It was only a germ of a thought to begin with," Ms. Lopes said in an interview. "And we have squelched it." ...

Ms. Lopes said a separate thesis-deposit form will probably be drafted for graduate students in research programs. She is organizing a meeting for Friday to discuss open-access policies with students and professors in those programs.

She acknowledged that the university had not thought through the implications of distributing students' creative-writing projects electronically. Graduate students in sciences and other scholarly fields often prefer to have their theses and dissertations widely disseminated online because that can lead to more citations of their research, which in turn can lead to professional advancement....

Update (3/19/08).  Just before I hit the road over the weekend, I had a very helpful email correspondence with Amy Charles, a 1995 graduate of the Workshop.  Among other things she shed new light on what I called the "embarrassment argument".  While some workshop participants don't want to distribute their theses because they are not proud of them, some have other reasons.  From Amy's email (with her permission):

...Regarding embarrassments:  I'm of two minds about this.  Yes, you're right, the work should be good.  On the other hand, it's conventional to start out writing little psychodramas modeled obviously on our families, boyfriends, girlfriends, teachers, friends enemies.  You cannot reasonably tell 25-year-old writers not to do this.  Neither can you tell them to make their treatment of these thinly-disguised characters wise and kind and humane and balanced and all sorts of things they won't be for another 20 years.  Happily, most of this stuff is never published, and until last week the presumption was that if it went into your UI thesis, it'd be buried safely in the UI library.  So yes, if you tell students that this is going to be published on the internet, you're going to inhibit their experiments, and that's probably not a good idea.... 

Update (4/11/08). Also see the advice of Karen Schneider, librarian and creative writer, written in May 2007, well before the Iowa controversy erupted.