Is Creative Commons Flexible Enough for Historians?

Gumby and Monkey, by Joe (CC-BY-SA)

Creative Commons licenses are incredibly useful. They're easy to use. More and more people understand them. It's even possible to do web searches of Creative Commons content making it easy to find content you can use with confidence. The Open Access movement, particularly in the UK, seems to be promoting Creative Commons licensing as the best way to move towards open access to research, because it means we can (largely) leave lawyers out of it all and implement a standard set of licenses that everyone understands (or should understand). I see the practical merits in that and am a big fan of keeping costs at a minimum. But I also see the counterpoint, that many historians feel Creative Commons just isn't designed for them (see my previous post on Alternative Licensing). Sometimes that feeling is based on a misunderstanding. Sometimes, I think, it's justified. In the interest of opening that discussion, I thought I'd present a couple of scenarios in which I believe Creative Commons is not flexible enough for historians looking to manage the rights associated with their research.

For all of these scenarios, let's assume the work in question is an academic monograph written solely by me.

1) Supporting certain derivations

What I want: I'd like people to be able to translate my book into a range of formats (braile, French, audio, stage performance) without having to ask me, provided that every effort is made to ensure that the translation accurately represents the arguments and positions of the original, and the translator is listed as such on the title page or where applicable. This reuse is only permitted if the entire work is included in the translation.

Why this is important to me: I'm a big supporter of accessibility; I wouldn't want anyone working to provide access to my work for the blind to feel they were prevented from doing that good work by a legal restriction.

Why CC is not sufficient: CC-BY would allow this type of reuse. But it would also allow someone to translate only the introduction, or to pick and choose parts and rearrange them in a way that changes my message. I'm worried if they do that someone might get the wrong idea about my work. You may not think that's important, but it's my book and my reputation, and I am worried. I could use a 'no derivatives' license, CC-BY-ND, but I do want to allow certain types of derivatives under certain conditions.

2) Supporting certain commercial reuses

What I want: I'd like professors creating course readers to feel empowered to use parts of my book with their students. I'd also like private individuals to be able to use individual chapters in edited collections with modest print runs (let's say less than 500). I don't want Evil Publishing Ltd to be able to do the same without asking.

Why this is important to me: I'm a big supporter of ensuring students and my colleagues have access to my work. I also think it's important to support small entrepreneurs. But I know that the publishing industry is big business, and if they're going to make big money from my ideas, I think it's fair to ask that I get a cut of that. Anyone who has ever licensed stock imagery to use on a website or in print knows that the price of the license changes with the number of 'impressions'. In essence, the bigger the advertising campaign, the more money they want to charge you to use the image. This merely attempts to apply those types of restrictions on my book.

Why CC is not sufficient: CC-BY wouldn't give me the power to put the restrictions on Evil Publishing Ltd that I believe is important. Forcing me to use CC in this instance forces me to give away rights I would like to hold onto.

* * *

Those are just a couple of simple examples, which I don't believe are far fetched when considering licensing and reuse from the historian's perspective. For them to work, I think at the very least we need to adopt a CC-BUT license, in which creators are allowed to add restrictions to their license. As I said before, if the concerns of licensors aren't met, they won't get on board. I'd like them on board, but that may need to come at the expense of what seems on the surface to be a simple CC solution.

Academic Freedom License: An Alternative to CC-BY

Professor Peter Mandler, President of the Royal Historical Society allegedly made this comment today at an Open Access event held in London. I was not at the event, but I have heard this concern expressed before: CC-BY licenses allow someone to take an academic work, completely twist the words of the author, and republish it in a way that suggests those are the opinions of the author (either intentionally or through ignorance).

The fear is certainly valid, whether you agree with the interpretation of the license or not. No academic would be happy with the idea of someone twisting their words and republishing something that, if misconstrued, could damage their reputation as a scholar.

I'm inclined to suggest that a CC-BY license does not in fact grant these rights, as the fine print about 'moral rights' points out, noting that 'derogatory treatment' of the licensor's work is not permitted.

Nevertheless, the terms of the license do suggest it is up to the licensor to monitor and police this activity, and if necessary, turn to the courts to enforce it. That's just not practical for a busy academic.

Remixing isn't the only problem. Copyright of images or graphs can also be an issue. Anyone who gives a public lecture these days will be familiar with the release forms that you're asked to sign that require you to grant someone the right to reproduce images and graphs you don't own that happen to be on your powerpoint slides. Academic monographs have the same problem. How can we release our content as open access if the work contains someone else's work for which we have had to ask permission?

If I'm not mistaken, these two issues are the biggest objections to CC-BY licenses for the humanities and social sciences. Thankfully, Professor Mandler has offered another solution, and I'm all for solutions:

New License needed for HSS (Humanities and Social Sciences)

What a fabulous idea. What on earth are we waiting for? I present to you all for consultation: the Academic Freedom License, designed specifically with the needs of academics in mind, that both promotes open access and reuse, and prevents the types of abuses outlined above.

Academic Freedom License

For works released under an 'Academic Freedom License', you are granted the right:

To Share - to copy, distribute and transmit the work in its entirety only.
To Analyse - to data mine and study the work and publish or create work of your own based on that analysis.
To Sell - to make commercial use of the work in its entirety only.

Under the following conditions:

Attribution - You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work)

Excluding - You are prohibited from sharing, analysing, or selling any aspects of the work specified by the author or licensor (such as images under copyright or sections not produced by the author)

With the understanding that:

Waiver - Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.

Public Domain - Where the work or any of its elements is in the public domain under applicable law, that status is in no way affected by the license.

Other Rights - In no way are any of the following rights affected by the license:

• Your fair dealing or fair use rights, or other applicable copyright exceptions and limitations;
• the author's moral rights
• Rights other persons may have either in the work itself or in how the work is used, such as publicity or privacy rights

Students should be empowered, not bullied into open access

'Bully Free Zone' by Eddie-S

The American Historical Association (AHA) has just adopted a resolution in support of recent graduates, encouraging them to feel empowered to keep their dissertations offline while they seek a publisher to turn that dissertation into a scholarly monograph.

Surprise, surprise, open access advocates everywhere have started snivelling.

No! they cry. We shouldn't support a resolution passed in good faith to protect the career progression of new scholars against scholarly presses that are allegedly refusing to accept manuscripts based on openly available dissertations. We should be burning books and the organizations that publish them. Down with books, up with free information on the Internet!

Lovely, but you can't eat free information. Makes a shit shelter as well.

Now, I certainly understand, sympathize, and even agree with the complaints of the open access community. Trevor Owens posted some great suggestions last night for ways to amend the AHA statement into one that recognizes some real flaws in the publication / promotion / tenure model that is over-reliant upon books. I certainly agree with Owens that it makes no sense to leave career progression of historians in the hands of acquisition editors at famous scholarly presses.

I'd also suggest that the AHA's claim that history is a "book" discipline is a bit too narrow. From where I live in London England, hundreds of thousands of people make their living either directly or indirectly off of history. That can be anything from freelance tour guides who offer historic walks through the City, to the cafeteria workers in the museums and historic sites, the actor who draws you into his theatre for a rendition of Richard III or the actress who portrays Elizabeth Woodville in a television series, or even her Majesty the Queen whose very presence and connection to a historic institution draws in millions of tourists every year.

The AHA's perspective is probably flawed in terms of the negative reaction of presses towards open access of dissertations. A yet to be published (and open access) article Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Social Sciences and Humanities suggests that the vast majority of publishers are willing to consider submissions based on openly available theses.

With all of this in mind, let's give the open access community what they want: You're right.

But dear God you're obnoxious.

The decision of the AHA to support this measure is nothing but a well-intentioned gesture designed to protect and empower those at the most vulnerable point in their career from a perceived threat. How could anyone could criticize them for that? The AHA and scholarly societies like it are not the enemy, and they don't operate to keep scholarship in the 19th century. They exist to promote the interests of their members, and that's exactly what the AHA has done with this resolution. If you want to change their direction, join them. Run for positions of power within their ranks, and influence the opinions of their membership. The historians who belong to these organizations aren't stupid, so if your ideas are good and your models sound, there's no reason we can't expect gradual change towards open access.

Both scholarly monographs and open access have their merits. We shouldn't be pushing for either / or, just like we havn't driven actors from the stage because we have television. Scholarly monographs are an effective way of preserving historical knowledge; they're in a format that the vast majority of us understand and even appreciate. We don't need to give that up.

And while I can appreciate the advantages of open access, its advocates often ignore the problems of an open access model. We live in a society in which things that have no cost have no perceived value. You wouldn't expect your lawyer to work for free, so why your historian? The scholarly presses defend their (failing) business model because it keeps their friends and family employed, their kids fed, and their bills paid. This isn't just a matter of profits funneling into the pockets of the rich. It's the way people like you and me make modest and honest livings.

If we start giving everything away we're promoting a model in which certain professions operate without the security of a paycheque while others doing important work continue to charge for their services. It's all well and good for open access advocates to tell us the benefits of their model, but until they come up with some solutions for its failings, they won't gain any friends who are sitting on the fence. Especially not if every well-intentioned effort by a scholarly society is met with a hostile barrage on Twitter by an extremist perspective that ignores the fact that we're all on the same team: We love history and we want to spend our careers sharing it with others.

If you want to give your dissertation away online, by all means do so. But it is your dissertation. You should feel equally empowered to bury it in a hole in the back yard, or throw it off a bridge. Anyone who tells you that you're bound by some moral obligation to give it away has a job, or a trust fund, and has no business putting any demands on your labour. Even if your scholarly book never earns you a cent, it's your prerogative to try and flog it any way you like. That doesn't make you a bad person. Neither does withholding your thesis from the Internet if you think that will help your pursuit towards a career that allows you to provide for your family. I hold my right to support my family far above your right to read my ideas for free.

I wholeheartedly want to thank the AHA for standing up for and empowering new scholars. No good deed goes unpunished, but there are many of us out there who appreciate your efforts and look forward to continued progress in what we hope becomes a civil debate and progression towards increased open access.

Voluntary Article Processing Charges for Scholarly Journals

The Article Processing Charge (APC) has started to rear its ugly head in many academic fields and it's threatening to spread wider, particularly in Britain as the government moves towards mandated open access publishing of research. This move means that publishers will lose out on subscription revenue and have instead turned towards APCs to compensate for that lost revenue. The idea here is that the author pays an APC (which could be anything from a few pounds to tens of thousands depending on the journal) and the publisher agrees to provide open access to the article.

The model isn't perfect, but it is realistic for many publishers, provided that no one is turned away if they cannot afford to pay. It turns out at least one not-for-profit journal has been able to adopt just such an idea that protects those vulnerable, while raising funds at the same time. The Journal for Open Research Software, run by the Software Sustainability Institute (of which I am a fellow - though I am not affiliated with the journal) offers a voluntary APC:

If your paper is accepted for publication, you will be asked to pay an Article Publication Fee of £25 to cover publications costs...You will be able to pay any amount from nothing to full charge, as we recognise that not all authors have access to funding, and we do not want fees to prevent the publication of worthy work. The editor and peer reviewers of the journal will not know what amount (if any) you have paid, and this will in no way influence whether your article is published or not.

I'm not sure how well this policy has worked for the Journal, but I have to say I'm incredibly enthusiastic about it for a few reasons. Firstly, it acknowledges openly that publishing - even open access publishing - DOES cost money. That money needs to come from somewhere, and APCs, like 'em or hate 'em, are one such solution. Secondly, it acknowledges that not everyone has a research budget - students, emeritus scholars, independent scholars - and that these people should not be squeezed out of the system of research publishing because of their career status. And thirdly, it's a creative solution that's taking on the challenge of raising money for publishing that thinks a little outside the box.

We're all going through changes in terms of publishing and academic funding. I for one am pleased to come across examples such as this that are facing those changes with optimism and ingenuity.

Making Open Access and the UK's Scholarly Society Work

This past Friday at a one-day colloquium on Open Access I learned why academic publishing is so expensive, and I was disappointed to discover that resistance to open access from scholarly societies is not linked to the costs of publishing, but to the cost of non-publishing activities. The UK is in the midst of a heated debate about Open Access, following the Finch Report and an incoming policy that will require all research funded by the taxpayer to be published open access. For this to work, publishers are to be paid up front for lost revenue in what has been called the "Gold Model" of author pays for publication.

Nearly everyone agrees open access is a good thing, but how to pay for it is a matter of contention. The government's policy works much better in the sciences where large research budgets are common and a few thousand quid for publication costs is a drop in the bucket. The Wellcome Trust's representative Simon Chaplin argued at the colloquium that they've been funding this practice for years and thought it was a great use of money.

I don't disagree with Chaplin, but few historians will ever see a grant the size of a typical Wellcome Trust award that can run hundreds of thousands or millions of pounds. Many historians operate entirely without funding, but those working in academic departments will have to find the money to publish in an open access format, else their work will not "count" towards the 2020 REF (the UK's program of counting up who does good research, used to disseminate future research funding). The government's proposal is also potentially disastrous for early career researchers who will find it difficult to secure funding to publish and who may have to choose between paying for food and "investing" in their career by paying for publications. Why would a department give a temporary employee (eg, Post Docs) access to funding for publishing that could go to permanent staff, when there's a good chance that employee will be contributing to another university's research outputs by the time the tallies are next taken?

While I did symapthize with many of the positions speakers took at the colloquium, it was the position of the scholarly societies in particular that I found most frustrating.

Let me first say that I think scholarly societies are wonderful. In particular I think they have been instrumental at supporting promising early career researchers through funding, bursaries, prizes, fellowships, and opportunities to publish. I should also note that I have been employed by a scholarly society since 2008 and take pride in the work we do.

What I do not like is how many scholarly societies get their money, which became clear to me this past Friday. Jane Humphries, President of the Economic History Society, spoke on the business model of her society. According to Humphries, 1/3 of their income comes directly from the subscriptions raised by the society's journal. These subscriptions are then used to fund the activities of the society rather than to pay the costs of publication alone. Humphries argues that without these subscriptions the society could not continue to function, which is a major push behind resistance to open access because most societies and publishers assume they will be forced to take what amounts to a paycut under the proposed models.

One of the activities of the Economic History Society is to fund 5 postdoctoral fellowships at a cost of £70,000. This fellowship scheme is a wonderful one and it's something I'd be very sad to see discontinued. However, it is NOT a publishing cost. Instead, the subscriptions are increased well above the cost of publication in order to participate in non-publishing activities. That means libraries are being charged a surplus. And libraries get much of their money from the pockets of students paying tuition who are indirectly funding these postdoctoral fellowships without a say in the matter. While the scheme is entirely and undoubtedly good intentioned, the society is not working as hard as it could to reduce the costs of publishing because it has a vested interest to constantly increasing its income and expanding its activities. They are effectively robbing Peter to pay Paul. And I'm Peter.

The problem therefore is not that publishing is expensive. It's not that open access is bad. It's that publishing in its current model pays for other good things which will not be supported under the new model. But that does not mean these wonderful extra activities need to cease, or that open access will not work. It means we need to get behind scholarly societies to find a new way to fund these activities.

So what can we do about the lost income? Well we might need to get creative, but here are two ideas.

Fundraising

I've yet to see any scholarly society attempt to fund a postdoctoral fellowship through crowdfunding on Kickstarter or a similar service. No one likes to pay taxes, but many people are willing to support a specific initiative. A £50 annual membership fee to a scholarly society feels much different than does a £50 donation that I know will go directly towards a fellowship.

Many societies also have natural connections to certain types of businesses, which could surely be approached for donations. In particular I'd imagine the Economic History Society, based near London's financial core, and peopled by many a former London banker-turned-historian could make use of its personal network to solicit donations from their sector. Saying you don't like to ask people for money is not an excuse, particularly if the alternative is to continue taking it from unwilling students.

Wikipedia runs entirely on a fundraising drive and I've never thought ill of them for it. In fact, I gave them $50 last year to support their continued activities.

Advertising

Ads are entirely under-used in academia. The Old Bailey Online is one of the few academic projects I've seen that freely uses Google Ads to cover some of the project's ongoing costs. There is absolutely nothing immoral about allowing someone to underwrite a society's activities in exchange for some exposure. Even if it is only a partial solution, it's one every society owes it to their communities to pursue.

* * *

Scholarly societies need to acknowledge that open access is not the problem. They need to be honest about what the REAL costs of publishing are, and they need to be open to ideas that can reduce those costs. Open access is good for nearly everyone. So let's embrace it, and then let's work together to find ways to continue to support the great activities of the scholarly societies. The future may not work the same as yesterday, but that doesn't mean we can't make it work.

How to Record a Presentation for the Web (Well)

By Adam Crymble

Few things are as ephemeral as speech. It is spoken, and it is gone. This is fine if you have just delivered the worst presentation of your life and want nothing more than to forget it. But, there are speeches worth saving. Research is global; not everyone who is interested in the speaker will be able to attend in person. Not everyone who will be interested is interested now – for example, a first year student may want to hear the presentation four years from now when she is working on her Master’s degree.

Academia has developed a solution to the ephemeral speech and it has become increasingly popular. The recorded lecture, often mistakenly referred to as a “podcast”, is a way of archiving what transpired at an event and making it available online. Many conferences and public lecture organizers are adopting this idea to increase the reach of their event to those outside the immediate room in which the presentation occurs.

However, while the solution is in place, the skills needed to enact it well are not. The recording process is frequently an afterthought, thrown into the hands of an inexperienced graduate student or an already taxed session chair. The recorder is left fumbling with a device he or she has likely never used, hoping desperately that they get it right on the first try.

Predictably, the results are usually poor. Even comparatively good examples often suffer from low-quality audio. Frequently, listeners will feel the recording lacks context and they will be frustrated if the speaker refers to slides that have not been included with the recording.

All this can be avoided with a little bit of planning and practice to ensure your recorded presentations are good recorded presentations that do justice to your speakers and your listeners.

Listen to or Watch a Good Example

Start with the best. No one has better online presentations than TED. “Ted Talks” are live presentations by passionate speakers that have been recorded and posted to the Ted.com website. They have become an Internet sensation and anyone considering archiving a speech should watch at least one Ted Talk. I am not suggesting you do as TED did and hire multiple professional cameramen, a director and a sound editing team. What I am suggesting is that you follow TED’s lead on the following key points.

Talk to your Speaker Beforehand

I do not mean simply get permission to record – although of course this is important and you should get permission in writing. Instead, I mean find out what type of presenter your speaker is. Do they use PowerPoint slides, and if so do they own the copyright or have permission to use all of the material? Do they wander around the room as they speak? Do they ask the audience to participate frequently?

By asking questions about the style of presentation the person intends to deliver you can preemptively find solutions to problems before they arise. If your speaker tells you she likes to move around a lot during the presentation, use this advanced knowledge to track down a wireless microphone that can clip onto her lapel. If your presenter plans to use a PowerPoint presentation with images that violate copyright, suggest he look into using images licensed by Creative Commons so that you can legally share his presentation.

Dedicate Someone

As soon as you decide to record the presentation, find someone whose sole job will be to handle the audio equipment and get him or her to practice. Days before the event, the recorder should know exactly how to use the recording equipment, what volume levels are suitable, and how close to the speaker the device will have to be. If the microphone must be clipped onto the speaker, the recorder should try the mic on a few locations on his or her own shirt to see how placement affects sound quality.

If the chair and the speaker are fairly far apart – more than a few feet – then be sure to check if the device will clearly pick up the chair’s voice. If it sounds like he or she is far away or “tinny” then consider getting a second recording device and record both people independently.

The audio testing should be done in the same room as that in which the presentation will take place, and if required, your recorder should make note of nearby power outlets to determine if an extension cord is needed.

By spending even one hour practicing and preparing, your recorder will be confident when the time comes for them to do their job.

When that time does arise, it is best to push the record button well before the presentation starts. The audio can always be edited later, but once a presentation starts – and often they start unexpectedly – what has been missed is gone. Make sure your recorder gets the speaker introduction, as well as the speech.

If the presenter is using slides, have your recorder note the time in the recording when the slides transition. This will make it much easier to combine the slides and the audio later.

The Context of the Room

A major complaint of listeners who access presentations online is the lack of context. When attending an event in person, you have the context of the physical space, the other people in the room, and even other presentations you have heard or plan to hear at the same event. When you listen online, this context disappears.

The chair of the session or the person introducing the speaker can provide this context, as long as they have been warned ahead of time. Most people in this position do their introduction the same way whether they are being recorded or not. That is, they speak only to those listeners in the room and often seem uncomfortable at the idea that people might be listening that they cannot see. Rather than address this virtual audience, they pretend it does not exist.

To get beyond this barrier, sit down briefly with your chair and give them some pointers on providing context to the online audience. One effective way of dealing with this problem is to have the chair acknowledge both audiences in the introduction. Thank everyone for coming, but also thank your online listeners. Provide a short blurb about the event and why you have gathered for it. The listeners in the room will recognize that your blurb is for the benefit of the online audience and will not be put off.

If you are recording multiple sessions with the same audience present, this can become repetitive and strange. In that case, record this context information later and it can be added to the start of your presentations in the editing stage. If you are not sure what context is missing, ask a colleague to listen to the recorded presentation; they will be able to tell you what needs to be added.

Question Period

Decide if you plan to include the question period in your recording. Often this means seeking the permission of everyone in the audience, but will vary depending on your jurisdiction and university policy. The challenge with question period is that it is often difficult to catch the questions on the recording device, particularly in a large room.

One solution is to require people who want to ask a question to go to a microphone. This can be obtrusive and adds to what is already a complex process, so you may decide to end your recording after the speaker finishes the formal presentation. By ending early, one tends to avoid the chair thanking everyone for coming and inviting them to head to the pub; the result is a more professional conclusion.

After the Fact

The work does not end when the recorder pushes the stop button. The audio will have to be edited. If your presenter used slides, ask for them and plan to create a “slidecast” that will pair the audio with the relevant slides. It is also a good idea to get a one to two paragraph abstract of the talk from the speaker, a one to two sentence bio of the presenter, and a half-dozen keywords that allow online visitors to find the presentation. Search boxes still cannot let us find out what is in an audio or video file, so you will need to provide enough information with the recording to let interested people find it.

Once you have received the slides and contextual information, you are ready to edit. This can be done by anyone and need not be the same person who made the recording. However, if you have more than one lecture it is a good idea to dedicate this job to one person. This will ensure that all of the recordings are consistent.

Editing the Audio

There are a number of good audio editing programs available. Audacity is an open source, free program that you can use to edit the audio and to adjust volume levels if needed. Mac users will find GarageBand, preinstalled on most new Mac’s, a useful tool for achieving the same.

If possible, try to avoid too much “dead air” at the beginning or at the end of a file. It is also a good idea to make sure you end the recording at a suitably calm point. Stopping abruptly in the middle of applause is less professional than fading down the volume or waiting for an appropriate break. MP3 is still the industry standard file format for audio, so if given the choice between formats, MP3 is a safe bet.

Adding the Slides

Often with online presentations if slides are available they will only be provided as a separate PowerPoint file available for download. This is better than nothing, but often it is not clear when the speaker transitioned slides and the listener must fumble to figure out which slide to look at. Because your recorder kept notes while listening to the speech, it should not be difficult to combine the slides and the audio into a video.

Again, Mac users should find iMovie installed on newer machines. This program makes it easy to drag slides and combine them with audio. If you do not have a Mac, SlideShare (http://www.slideshare.net), a website dedicated to sharing slides, now allows you to combine audio and slides, and to adjust timing all within your Internet browser window.

Share it

Once you have finished editing the presentation, you are ready to share it. Post it to your event website, department website, or to a video or audio sharing site. Make sure you let the presenter know it is available, and finally, promote the presentation as widely as possible. By promoting the recorded presentation, your conference or lecture can live on beyond the end of the live event and can continue to engage listeners for years to come.

Taking a few moments to plan and adding a little extra time editing will ensure the recorded presentation is almost as good as the original. Some presentations are worth saving, and those that are, are worth saving well.

Adam Crymble is the Webmaster for the Network in Canadian History & Environment, an organization that has archived over 150 academic presentations. Adam would like to thank Sean Kheraj for his comments on a draft of this article.

Do People Want Open Access to Research?

If you post a peer reviewed article on your blog, will anyone care?

Apparently, emphatically yes.

In an experiment earlier this week I decided to post my recent article about Social Media use by Archives and Archivists (see my previous entry) and made a quick announcement on Twitter. The response was far greater than I expected, with over 700 people in just a few days taking the time to visit and read the abstract or access the PDF and I received messages from several archivists thanking me for sharing the article.

As you can see from the graph of my recent traffic on this oft-neglected site, the results weren't typical.

So what does this mean? Well I think we can infer a few things from this.

Firstly, that people want to read research. Secondly, if authors retain copyright of their work, that access becomes possible.

The only reason I was able to - legally - offer this article to readers was because of Archivaria's very forward-thinking rights assignment policy in which I retain the copyright for the work but grant Archivaria all the rights they need to publish as many copies as they like in as many forms as they like. In return, I have been asked to always provide a full citation whenever I reproduce the article to acknowledge the work of Archivaria.

As an author, this rights assignment policy was the most influential single factor I took into consideration when choosing a journal in which to publish. In this case I overlooked larger journals who demand authors assign full rights, because I believe the whole point of me doing research is to share the results.

Arbitrarily assigning all rights doesn't achieve that goal if the article then sits behind a paywall that may or may not be heavily subscribed.

So what can we do to promote this open-access attitude?

I think the first thing is to start telling editors that you want it.

For writers:

• Email editors before you submit and tell them you have an article idea but you are a supporter of open access and you would like to know the journal's policy.
• Protect your copyright. Negotiate your copyright assignment so that both the editor and you can benefit. There is absolutely no need for you to give away your copyright. And if you are going to give it away, insist that everyone has access: license it under Creative Commons.

For readers:

• Let editors of publications know that you want to cite material in their publications but you do not have access and will have to overlook their contributions.
• Let authors know you would like to cite material they wrote but you do not have access and will have to overlook their contributions.
• Thank editors who have formulated forward-thinking copyright policies that promote open access to research.

On that last note, I'd encourage anyone who accessed my article over the past week to contact Archivaria (Contact Info) and let them know that you appreciated being able to read their material. Sometimes a little thank you goes a long way to driving change.