Balancing the ‘Brahmin principle’ with the profit motive in scholarly publishing
Growing up in India in the 1970s and 80s, in a culturally eclectic family, finding ‘overlaps and resemblances’ (p.46) among different cultures was a regular part of our minute family ecology. I was strongly reminded of these resemblance-finding exercises by a recent debate at Oxford’s Bodleian on the topic of Open Access in publishing.
The passionate advocacy of Open Access by Professor John Willinsky was grounded in a deep regard for scholarly knowledge as a ‘public good’. The concept may be aligned to what might be called the ‘Brahmin principle’ in Indian culture. Shearing it of the weight, controversies and complexities of different perspectives, the respect for Brahmins, people belonging to the highest caste in Hinduism, is rooted in two unspoken expectations – that Brahmins devote their lives to the pursuit of knowledge, and that they eschew the pursuit of material things.
Knowledge, thus generated, is supposed to enrich the whole of society,
which explains the high status of Brahmins. Anyone familiar with Indian history will know that this is very much a theoretical and cultural assumption; it does not reflect reality. However, the intuitive links made in these assumptions that applaud the separation of knowledge as a ‘public good’ from an unalloyed pursuit of wealth are important.
It is these same links that often underlie the current dissatisfaction in many quarters with the profits made by some big publishers, who control much of the publication of scholarly research. For a large number of people around the world, access to research publications is only possible through high paywalls and they decry what they think is the adoption of a business culture of ‘more, more, more’ in an area that should be more focused on serving public interest.
Nevertheless, the first copyright law, The Statute of Anne in the UK, recognised as far back as 1709-10 that ‘the reprinting of books’ without the consent of authors and their authorised publishers could lead to ‘their utter Ruin, [resulting in] … the Discouragement of all Writers in any useful Part of Learning’. This was the birth of copyright. Authors and their authorised publishers were granted the legal right to control the ‘copying’ or reproduction of a ‘book’ for their economic benefit.
More recently, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has linked greater protection of intellectual property to a ‘country’s ability to generate economically valuable … assets’ enabling it to achieve a whole host of developmental goals. Most countries have responded by strengthening or lengthening – or both – their copyright laws to guarantee economic benefits to knowledge creators.
However, what the Statute of Anne also reflected, and what remains true of many difficult negotiations at WIPO today, is that Intellectual Property laws must deal with a constant tension between rewarding intellectual work and securing the widest dissemination of it to spark yet more ideas. The parliamentarians debating and passing the old statute started out with a Bill ‘for Securing the Property of Copies in Books’, but ultimately passed ‘An act for the encouragement of learning’, which restricted the term of copyright monopoly and, rather remarkably, empowered listed authorities to ‘limit and settle the price of … printed book …[or] books’ if they were put on sale at ‘too high and unreasonable’ a price after the end of the copyright period (clause IV).
Much water has flowed under the bridge since the passing of the Statute of Anne. The global trade ties, often created coercively under colonial regimes, have morphed into a more open, though not necessarily more level, playing field during the current phase of globalisation. At the same time, growth of digital technologies, coupled with the seeming entropy in political and ecological fields, has highlighted both opportunities and challenges that cry out for fresh ideas for solving intractable global problems.
In the past two decades the Open Access movement has tried to meet this need by encouraging scholars and researchers to make their works freely available using the internet. Notably, this is not a rescinding of their copyright but only a bypassing of pay-based restrictions upon reading of research for personal and, mostly, non-commercial uses – allowing the seeds of ideas to fall where they will, so to speak. Despite initial hesitation from publishers, we seem to have reached a moment when almost everyone is agreed that universal Open Access to research must decide the direction of travel in this field.
Yet research and its dissemination are expensive business even in the digital era and new research-and-publication models, which strike a balance between fair remuneration for the publisher and wider public access to research, are sorely needed. At the Bodleian debate and in his recent book Copyright’s Broken Promise, Professor Willinsky has offered a radical solution. He proposes that the copyright law should be changed to recognise a special category of ‘scholarly’ works (full definition to be worked out) that will have ‘Open Access’ copyright status, rather than the ‘all rights reserved’ version currently in force, upon first publication; this will mean that authors will no longer have to find ‘workarounds’ like Creative Commons licences to make their research more widely available. A fair price for the publishers will be worked out through a mechanism for negotiation among publishers, research funders and prime users like libraries.
This recommendation encapsulates the sentiment of knowledge-creation as a public service that is the first tenet of the Brahmin principle. Without going so far as the complete austerity idealised by the Brahmin principle’s second tenet, it also reflects a universal belief that the profit motive in this sector should be limited by other considerations. There is no attempt to deny the value added by publishers in taking research to its target audience, adding value through editing and peer reviews and helping to create a global idiom that allows a marketplace of ideas to flourish across national borders; yet scholars aim for both remuneration and recognition – not necessarily always in that order.
A less radical step to achieve this end may be the strengthening and widening of co-publishing arrangements between universities and publishers, which already exist in many places. Both as the main producers and consumers of research, universities are major drivers of the Open Access movement. Digital technologies like freeware mean that they are less dependent on, though not independent of, the need to publish all research output through publishers only. With a levelling of balance between the two stakeholders, it may be possible to institute self-regulatory mechanisms of the kind found in the advertising industry, with a regulatory body formed from amongst its various stakeholders; its own code of practice; complaints procedure; consultation methods and international-cooperation procedures. This may allow for academic values and the profit motive to balance each other out.
After all, whether we use Professor Willinsky’s Enlightenment phrase of ‘the Progress of Science’ for the good of society, or the ‘Brahmin principle’, digital technologies have asked the question: what price knowledge circulation? And scholars are increasingly answering by inclining towards the idealised Brahmanical austerity way.
Image 1 from Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash; Image 2 from https://www.copyrighthistory.com/anne.html