Harvard University Press Blog

Can't Find It, Can't Sign It: On Dissertation Embargoes

The American Historical Association’s Statement on Policies Regarding the Embargoing of Completed History PhD Dissertations, released earlier this week, kicked off a round of debate that few lurking in any corner of the academic interwebs can have missed. Much of the conversation has been based on inaccurate or merely ungenerous interpretations of the statement, and the AHA made a quick attempt to address the straw men by posting a Q&A on the statement, followed by an essay from AHA past president Bill Cronon. Rather than an endorsement of a blanket ban on online availability of dissertations, they explain, the AHA “objects to institutions requiring that all dissertations go online immediately,” favoring instead flexible policies that allow young historians to weigh the impact a dissertation’s availability may have on their prospects for securing a publishing contract.

The thrust of the negative reaction to the statement, though, seems to be general disappointment in the perceived priorities of a scholarly society in the face of evolving models for and economics of scholarly production and dissemination, library purchasing patterns, and academic career tracks. The AHA’s Q&A addresses these points as well, but the disagreement here stems from conflicting principles—imagined or actual—not the parsing of any particular statement. It’s not a new conflict, and definitely not one we’d claim any chance of resolving here.

What we can do, though, is say a bit about our own practices in the acquisition of first book projects. Various survey findings and conversational gleanings have been cited by both sides of this debate, and perhaps our piping up here amounts to nothing more than another node of “inference, anecdote, and fear.” But the alternative—sitting back while other parties debate the behavior of publishers—seems a bit odd.

Most people involved in this discussion likely understand that a publication-ready dissertation is a rare thing. Generally speaking, when we at HUP take on a young scholar’s first book, whether in history or other disciplines, we expect that the final product will be so broadened, deepened, reconsidered, and restructured that the availability of the dissertation is irrelevant. It’s only fair to note, though, that from a business perspective this position is at least in part a function of our size. As one of the country’s larger university presses, we have the capacity to ensure that we can help usher the project to that expanded state. We also have grown our sales and distribution channels to the extent that the possibility of X number of academic libraries rejecting the book based on access to the dissertation doesn’t have to be as great a factor for us as it may be for smaller UPs.

Launch of the Digital Public Library of America

The Digital Public Library of America launches today, having gone from concept to concrete more swiftly than anyone could have hoped. As has been envisioned from the beginning, the DPLA is “an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that draws on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform, and empower everyone in the current and future generations.” The DPLA begins with an already-impressive array of materials, but has even bolder ambitions, along with an encouraging concern with sustainability.

No individual has been as important to the DPLA’s trajectory as Harvard’s University Librarian (and many-time HUP author) Robert Darnton, who has tracked the project’s progress in a series of articles for the New York Review of Books. In his most recent, he recaps the initiative’s brief history and explains its intentions:

How to think of it? Not as a great edifice topped with a dome and standing on a gigantic database. The DPLA will be a distributed system of electronic content that will make the holdings of public and research libraries, archives, museums, and historical societies available, effortlessly and free of charge, to readers located at every connecting point of the Web. To make it work, we must think big and begin small. At first, the DPLA’s offering will be limited to a rich variety of collections—books, manuscripts, and works of art—that have already been digitized in cultural institutions throughout the country. Around this core it will grow, gradually accumulating material of all kinds until it will function as a national digital library.

Darnton goes on to detail a DPLA-affiliated project that is particularly exciting for us here at the Press:

At one time or other, nearly every student comes in contact with a poem by Emily Dickinson, who probably qualifies as America’s favorite poet. But Dickinson’s poems are especially problematic. Only a few of them, horribly mangled, were published in her lifetime.

As Darnton notes, the manuscript copies of Dickinson’s poems “pose important puzzles, because they contain quirky punctuation, capitalization, spacing, and other touches that have profound implications for their meaning.” The originals, which are held in a few invaluable collections—notably at Amherst College Library, the Boston Public Library, and Harvard’s Houghton Library—have now been digitized and combined with printed editions edited by Thomas H. Johnson in 1955 and by Ralph W. Franklin in 1981, both of which are jewels of HUP’s own catalog. The manuscripts and printed poems will be brought together with a wealth of other supplementary documentation to create an Emily Dickinson Archive. Brigham Young University has also partnered with Amherst College, the BPL, Harvard, HUP, and the DPLA in this project that will greatly expand access to our collective knowledge of one of the country’s great literary icons while also inspiring new scholarship and discourse on her life and work.

The Copley branch of the BPL—the first large free municipal library in the United States—was to host a gala launch for the DPLA today. The Copley library is now at the center of a crime scene, though, directly beside the terrible and tragic Boston Marathon explosions, and so today’s events have been cancelled. In his statement on the cancellation, DPLA Executive Director Dan Cohen called the building of a new library “one of the greatest examples of what humans can do together to extend the light against darkness,” and the site’s launch will proceed today as planned. An even larger event to properly celebrate the creation of the DPLA is now in the works for this fall.

Aaron Swartz and Prosecutorial Discretion

In the sad story of Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old internet pioneer, organizer, and activist who took his own life on January 11th, many have questioned the doggedness with which federal prosecutors were pursuing him. Swartz, who was under indictment for allegedly downloading a large number of papers from the JSTOR database with the intention of making them freely available online, faced 13 felonies for which he was threatened with up to 50 years in prison. Despite JSTOR itself urging that the charges be dropped, prosecutors apparently insisted on prison time and a guilty plea on all counts as conditions of any bargain.

The general consensus has been that the government sought to make an example of Swartz, and that the case drove his turn to suicide at least in part. The Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig, a close friend and collaborator of Swartz’s, highlights the seeming injustice of the prosecutorial tenacity:

For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House—and where even those brought to “justice” never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled “felons.”

In that world, the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million-dollar trial in April—his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge. And so as wrong and misguided and fucking sad as this is, I get how the prospect of this fight, defenseless, made it make sense to this brilliant but troubled boy to end it.

Writing at The Verge, Tim Carmody offers an answer, detailing the symbolic work the justice department likely expected their prosecution of Swartz to do:

Aaron had become a target for investigation by the federal government. He was on file as a “hacker” who was willing to exploit gaps in the law and in networks in order to make his point… [In the JSTOR case], the Secret Service and US Attorney’s office, led by Assistant US Attorney Stephen Heymann and his boss Carmen Ortiz, had both the discretion and the institutional incentives to run wild on him. And that, with many, many ellipses, is how we got here… The government didn’t need to prosecute a big fish if it could make Aaron look like one. The police don’t need to stop drug kingpins if they can make anyone in a car with drugs look like one. Turning disobedience into felonies becomes the easiest thing in the world. The prosecutors wanted headlines, conviction statistics, promotions, and to make the public feel that computer crime was important and dangerous but something was being done about it. Aaron Swartz, because of his prominence in the tech community and history with PACER and SOPA, was just notorious enough to get the job done. Aaron Swartz was linkbait.

On the Perils of a Deep Backlist - And Spelling

One of our lovely and brilliant sales reps, Ms. Briana Ross, recently received an order from an account in Korea. She went to our in-house database to check stock levels and confirm prices for the included titles, but couldn’t find a listing for one of them: Relative Frequency of English Speech Sounds. Could they have included a book that wasn't actually ours?  Happens all the time.  But, just to be sure, she checked our distributor’s database, and, sure enough, there it was, in database shorthand: RELATIVE FREQ ENGL SPEECH SOUNDS. Published 1950. Stock available.

Recent book world developments have made it more important than ever for publishers to have complete, accurate data on even their oldest titles. Ebooks provide the opportunity to renew wide access to long out-of-print titles. Efforts by Google and others to digitize enormous amounts of books plucked from the world's libraries put the onus on publishers to loudly and accurately plant flags over all of their deep backlists. Given our focus on updating and maintaining our database, a missing record is a pretty rare thing for us these days. So, Briana of course understood that we’d need this title added to our system right away.

She sent a note to our database developer letting him know of the need. He created the record and then, out of curiosity, did a web search for the title. He found it listed via an online seller as Relativ Frequency of English Speech Sounds. “Relativ?” Weird. We hoped they hadn’t gotten that bad data from us.

Once the record was created, we could put the book on our website, a job for me. Wanting a little more information than just the raw data, I hoofed up two flights to our library and found the book, right where it was supposed to be, filed under the name of the author, Godfrey Dewey. Except, on the spine and the title page: Relativ Frequency of English Speech Sounds. “Relativ?” Weird. Publisht Under the Direction of the Graduate School of Education. “Publisht?” What’s happening? I know we’re dusty, but has HUP actually been around longer than spelling?

I skimmed some pages. “The procedure of the fourth stage, analisis by sounds, which required in all about 720 hours, was similar to that above described for the sillable analisis.” Getting weirder.

“Tables 3 and 4 of words in order of frequency ar immediately followed by Tables 5 and 6 of the same words in alfabetic order, also in parallel columns and showing frequencies.” Not even sure this Dewey chap knew the alphabet, let alone its order.

But, finally, an explanation, from the book’s front matter:

And so, ashamed of our prejudice, and ever toward a rational orthografy, we giv you: Relativ Frequency of English Speech Sounds, Second Edition. In print and available.

Bringing Two Classics Back to HUP

The publishing world is full of complicated deals. Contracts, territories, agents, excerpts, royalties, permissions, restrictions, etc. Behind each book there’s a lot of fine print for the subsidiary rights managers and intellectual property mavens to sort through (very thankful for them, by the way). This fall, by some happy coincidence, enough of that fine print aligned for us to make two genuinely important books available from Harvard University Press in paperback for the first time.

One comes from Edward O. Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sociobiology and The Ants, among many other titles. We first published Wilson in the early 1970s, and our long relationship continues with his contribution of the foreword to Michael Canfield’s Field Notes on Science and Nature, a beautiful book we’ll publish this spring. In 1992 we published the original cloth edition of Wilson’s The Diversity of Life, which Steven Jay Gould called “a deft and thoroughly successful mixture of information and prophecy.” The book was an early landmark of environmental alarm, as Wilson predicted that human behavior could become the sole cause of the sixth great spasm of extinction on earth. Our new paperback edition includes the original text as well as a new preface by Wilson.

The other title newly available as an HUP paperback is Albert Hourani’s groundbreaking A History of the Arab Peoples, which we first published in cloth in 1991. Hourani, who died in 1993, was one of the most distinguished scholars of the Arab world and the Middle East, and this book was hailed as the first accessible history of Arab cultures, societies, economies, and thought. On the book’s release the late Edward Said described it as a deeply reassuring and redemptive work, a book whose importance would be difficult to overestimate. Our revised 2003 cloth edition introduced a new afterward from Malise Ruthven, a former editor with the BBC Arabic Service and World Service in London, which is also included in this new paperback.

Harvard University Press, like most scholarly presses, is essentially small potatoes in the grand scheme of publishing, where giants like Random House and HarperCollins positively dwarf us. These things being what they are, we’re a bit like a small market ballclub in that, when we develop great young stars, we can’t always afford to keep them. In the early 1990s, when supply channels looked so different than they do today, it occasionally made sense for HUP to license important books with mass appeal to commercial publishers with their greater resources. Those licensing deals eventually expire, as they did for these two titles, and the evolution of the book world has been such that it made great sense for us to bring these books back home.

Both The Diversity of Life and A History of the Arab Peoples were updated with beautiful new designs, and are priced to encourage their continued inclusion in the many college courses that have long revolved around these greatly influential works. Here’s to a great future for these two books with such illustrious pasts.

Participating in the Circulation of Copies

Marcus Boon's In Praise of Copying, which we published this month, has been called a "road map through the deepest meanings of our age of mechanical reproduction." Well, the book is done, but Boon's still mapping. On his blog, and reproduced here, Boon walks through the thinking that led to our making a full text pdf of In Praise of Copying available for free download on our website.

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I am uploading my new book onto the internet. Yes, I am. The book is not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of commodification … OK, I’m copying again, from the introductory lines of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “Unpacking My Library”, which media theorist Julian Dibbell riffed on in his dawn of the downloading age essay “Unpacking My Record Collection”. Those two excellent essays were concerned with the figure of the collector. But what concerns me here is, to use the title of another of Benjamin’s essays, “the author as producer”, and the act of donating a book, “my book”, to a library, if library is the right word for the place where my text is being deposited.

While I was finishing In Praise of Copying, I became interested in the circulation of texts. I wondered whether it was hypocritical to write a book that celebrates copying, while still slapping a copyright notice to the front of the book. There are easy ways out of this: I could say that what I’m doing is presenting a critique of contemporary society but that obviously I have to work pragmatically within existing economic conditions, even though I disapprove of them. There’s some truth to that. In fact, the copyright notice to many academic books is in the name of the publisher, not the author. When I talked to people at Harvard, they pointed out to me that in signing a book contract, I had already signed away most of the rights to the book, and that it was therefore more honest for the publisher to claim and look after the copyright. I could have requested that I retain the copyright, as I did with my first HUP published book, but I thought there was something persuasive about their argument. And that I don’t need to own the copyright in order to feel some sense of agency in relation to what I’d written.

But I still wanted to explicitly allow people to make copies of my book about copying. I asked Harvard whether this was possible and they said yes. As of October 1, 2010, the book has been available from Harvard’s website as a pdf, free to download, but with a creative commons license that restricts the uses of the copy. I wrote the following text to accompany the web page:

“Given the topic and stance of In Praise of Copying, I wanted the text to participate openly in the circulation of copies that we see flourishing all around us. I approached Harvard to discuss options and they agreed to make the book available as a PDF online. The PDF is freely available to anyone who wants to download it, but it does come with a creative commons license that sets some intelligent restrictions on what you can do with it. Although generosity is a wonderful thing, this isn’t especially intended as a utopian gesture towards a world in which everything is free. It’s recognition of the way in which copies of texts circulate today, a circulation in which the physical object known as the book that is for sale in the marketplace has an important but hardly exclusive role. A PDF of a book is not an illegitimate copy of a legitimate original but participates in other kinds of circulation that have long flourished around the book-commodity: the library book; the photocopy or hand-written copy; the book browsed, borrowed or shared. We all know these modes of circulation exist, as they continue to do today with online text archives.

Perhaps these online archives just make visible and more “at hand” something that was happening invisibly, more distantly, but continuously before. At the same time, something new is going on. The physical book today is one copy, one iteration of a text among others. What that means for publishers, writers, readers and other interested parties is something that we are working out – on this webpage and elsewhere.”