Open Access Literature

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1 Panelists
2 Panel Description
3 Speaker Presentation Slides
4 Remote Questions for Panelists
5 Notes
6 Resources and papers

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Panelists

Speakers

Achal Prabhala - Consultant, Lawyers Collective, India
Binyavanga Wainaina - Writer-in-Residence, Union College, New York
Gary Dauphin - Blackplanet.com, Africana.com, AOL Black Voices
Rob Spillman - Editor, Tin House magazine and Executive Editor, Tin House Books
Michael Vazquez - Advisory Editor, Transition magazine

Moderator

Manon Ress - Director, Information Society Projects, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)

A2K2 Conference Organizer

Jami Johnson - Student, Yale Law School

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Panel Description

Open Access has thus far been applied to obviously “useful” things such as science literature. Although Creative Commons (CC) has made an effort to bring music, literature, and art under its banner, it remains true that most CC licenses remain confined to scientific scholarship and other such practical materials [note: is this true? Most of the CC licenses I see are on photo, video, audio clips and other elements of cultural production - but I'm biased as a media producer - schock]. However, while the objective value of Open Access literature is less immediately apparent to many observers, access to literature nevertheless contributes significantly to international, cross-border exchanges of knowledge. This panel will explore the benefits of open access literature in fostering cross-cultural dialogue and in improving information flow between and among nations. It will further attempt to answer such questions as:

How might open access literature improve transfer of knowledge not just from North to South but also encourage information flow between and among countries in the South?
What role can small literary magazines, a domain of publishing that has traditionally been resistant to a2k-type ideas but that is also open to new business models and to experimental modes of publication, play in the open access to literature movement?
How might open access literature archives be structured? How would such a structure differ from structures useful for scientific publications?
What issues about licensing and viability are raised by OA literature?

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Speaker Presentation Slides

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Remote Questions for Panelists

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Notes

Notes on presentation prepared by Jami Johnson. Any mistakes are mine.

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Achal Prabhala

Welcome, and thanks for coming. I'm going to start by talking about what Heron Collective is. In December 2006, a group got together in Nairobi, Kenya to talk about how we could formalize an entire series of informal interactions--conversations that were happening anyway--to find a way to turn that into some sort of system that would do something for a much larger public.

Heron is an open access literature collective. Licensed through open content licensing. Content is freely accessible and freely usable which means there are few limits on the way in which it can be recirculated. We wanted to do this because we’re from different parts of the world, and we were interested in engaging the world in a way we felt wasn’t happening enough in the literary magazine sphere.

Who’s in the collective? Civil Lines, Kwani?, Bidoun, Sarai Reader, Transition (US), Tin House (Portland and Brooklyn), Sable (UK), Mute (among others). Why these magazines? They all know each other. But also magazines share a common grammar. They are young, contemporary, open to new business models. Why the collective? A developing nations CC license developed to provide for licenses where literature could be distributed commercially in developed countries but open access in developing nations.

English-language cultural flows are still more common between developing nations and developed nations rather than directly between developing nations themselves. This is not the way it has to be. There are 275 million speakers of English in the US and the UK, but there are also 275 million speakers of English in India, Nigeria, S. Africa, and Kenya.

The Collective is working on:

Access

Open archives
Open licensing

Circulation

Living archives
Repackaging the past with the present
Model: aldaily.com

Distribution

Selling the physical product
Ad exchanges
Content exchanges

Production

Interaction between readers and weriters
Forums for writers and reviewers
Models overmuno.com and zoetrope.com

Nothing obviously useful: just serious fun.

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Questions

Manon Ress: Are we talking about online or physical?

Answer: Both

Manon Ress: Do all of you share a business model?

Michael Vasquez: I’m sure you’ll have questions about that after Gary Dauphin speaks.

Achal Prabhala: We’re looking for ways to have more people read rather than to have more people consume.

Gary Dauphin: The economies of scale that are at play .

Audience member: You might want to consider a model as part of your business plan something like bookmooch.com. Bookmooch is a means of swapping books, and the only cost is the postage. You list what you’ve got, and people wanting what you’ve got contact you, and when you send off a book you get a credit that you can use to get a book from someone else.

Rob Spillman: There are problems getting stuff into the country (customs, etc.)

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Michael Vazquez

Bidoun: Middle Eastern arts and culuture magazine, has elaborate illustrations and artwork.

As an magazine, you think the only thing you have that is different from anyone else is your content, so the natural instinct is to not want to give it away. At Transition, I believed we could not put our content online or people would not buy it. But really, newsstands are often promotional, and going online is like accessing a much larger newsstand.

If someone would win an award, we thought we should digitize the article so that the author could link to it. What we found was that by putting by a really excellent reflection online by an African-American author writing about going back to Senegal and getting thrown in jail, that piece of writing introduced Transition to a magazine in [unintelligible] Africa who published it there. I met Binyavanga Wainaina at a conference, and he posted two articles from Transition in the first edition of Kwani?

The meeting in Narobi was particularly gratifying for me because many of my favorite writers were also editors and were often engaged in the same kind of ways but laboring in really strange and disparate vineyards.

Achal Prabhala was the posterboy for one of the problems we wanted to solve. He was a beautiful writer and only wrote for obscure magazines with no newsstand presence and that were not published in India. One thing we want to do is to develop a network online that will grow. We plan to develop a complete as possible archive of back material. We’re creating a new website that will effectively be a new magazine. One of the primary purposes of it is to air a bunch of literature that has never been aired. We’ll be able to put together a new collection of material, much more quickly, to reflect what’s happening now.

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Binyavanga Wainaina

I’m a writer and the editor of the thing called Kwani? which librarians would call an annual book series.

It seems like every break I have made has come through the internet. When I was first thinking of beginning to write, the fact that I could go online and see that there were other people doing this same thing was critical because there was no one around me I could show this stuff without having them think I was crazy. Sharing with African writers of my generation, the theme comes up repeatedly of people who might have chosen a different path but for a chance encounter with someone else, mostly online.

I met another author in late 90s in an online community and started sending his work to him, and the piece he sent ended up being published in the Sunday Times and then won the Caine Prize. When it came time for the Caine Prize, three of the shortlisted authors had already met in an online community. The whole idea of whether all this would have been possible without the internet has been something I’ve been thinking about a lot.

When I was doing Kwani?, we didn’t have any money, so we put up a pdf. It was a strategic pdf because we wanted to submit for the Caine Prize, so we had to publish. But people saw the pdf and we began to make connections with people who saw it online to get money to publish in hard copy.

Finally, what I’d like to aspire to is for this Collective to be a thing that is greater than the sum of its parts and to encourage writers to engage with digital forms. This will be hard in some cases. I know writers who will not send their things out by post because they are worried it will be pirated. I think they should be pirated. Many of these people have been writing for 20 years and have made $90, so what do they have to lose?

Michael Vasquez: Something I’ve been thinking about that amplifies that. There’s this thing that’s true of magazines that’s also true of websites. They are something you do to join an imagined community but you also do it to try out being a writer. This is why there was no real literary magazine in East Africa after Transition left for over 25 years. The existence of magazines organizes literary activity and encourages people to write. And websites do that, too. Now you can become a leading commentator through use of the internet. The website will build communities that would not be able to exist through out individual magazines.

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Gary Dauphin

Unlike a lot of people here, my background is in the for-profit media, websites targeting African-American minorities in the United States. My background is working in ideologically activated media that does not assume foundational or government funding. One of the things we’ve striven to do is to make this self-supporting after the initial round of foundation funding.

My job as technologist is to concretize the business model to make this process works. There are lots of great magazines that you can’t reach through Google. We also want to concretize this community through a database, where you can get a sense of these people and this community and how they relate to one another, to make those relationships open and legible through this website. That means people opening up the archives and opening up their brand.

What do we need to do?

We need to get the archives digitized.
We need to build the website to house all of this stuff, and it has to be low bandwidth. A lot of people are getting online in areas where they do not have broadband.
We need a relatively simple open access interface
We need low costs. There is some foundation money coming in, but we need to be able to run this as a startup for 2 years, and after that it needs to sustain itself. A lot of the magazines don’t pay anything, so it’s not that big of a change.
We need a way of attracting people to the website, including new and timely programming.
We need a global fulfillment system. We need a way to get hard copies of these magazines to every country
We need an ecommerce system that works across borders. This is probably the longest arc for this project.
We need to look at other ways of getting people to pay for things, including possibly allowing people to pay for things through text messaging

I think this is not a new business model, but an old one. We want to sell things online. I want to build and online community platform that will incentivize 1 million interactions per month. If that leads to one one hudredth of one percent to commercialize, that’s 1200 sales a year, and that’s a 25% increase in total circulation among the collective as a group.

What does one million interactions look like? Some of it will be Google hits and other chance visitors, but it’s also about building a community of repeat users, including a community of writers without an audience. We’re offering a place that is more in line with what people are already doing than many of the other sites out there. We want to allow blogging and posting and other interactive community features.

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Rob Spillman

I find that the most dynamic fiction these days comes from cultures in transition and cultures in conflict. I've been reaching out more and more internationally. I decided last spring to do an issue that had no US writers, and mostly writers that had not been published in the United States at all. The challenge of trying to find these authors was incredible. I couldn’t find anything international out there, had to really hunt and peck. But online there was a lot of stuff going on. Sites like Words Without Borders had translators publishing works that they were working on. I started reading WWB obsessively and then contacting the translators and was seeing more stuff online than in the print world.

I found that people who knew about Tinhouse around the world knew about it from the web. It was very hard to get distributed in print abroad but online, it takes on a life of its own. Selfishly, I am excited about the amount of work I'm getting from overseas, and I see the Collective as a way to find new writers and to expose his readers to more interesting work and a more worldly conversation.

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Questions

Achal Prabhala: Maybe you can say something about how you work in a context where writers have a better chance of making a living from publishing.

Rob Spillman: My model is different in that I’m for-profit, and I have a backer that pays writers and pays them well. My standard contract is that I have rights to the story for shelf life (~3 months) and then the rights revert to the author at the end of that term. Writers, especially American writers are slow to give up their work, especially established writers. A short story collection that sells 10,000 copies is a big success in the US, and getting writers to open up to open access can be a challenge. I have to talk them through it.

Manon Ress: Going back to the authors’ fears of putting things online, some have said that shoplifting is a greater threat to authors than publishing online.

Gary Dauphin: Keep in mind, RS notwithstanding, for many people these magazines make no money. They are a labor of love, and many of the works in the Collective have no access to digitization or to archives, so for them this is a big deal.

Michael Vasquez: There is precedent in this area. Musicians share their music, and they don’t make any money from it, but they do it to promote themselves. Kwani? Sells T-shirts, and they are hard to get. If it becomes more accessible… for many of these magazines an extra $1000 is a big deal.

Gary Dauphin: One of the things we realized in Nairobi is that this is not just a good idea but is a necessity because many of these publications is in danger of not surviving. I used to work for an online dating sites, and one of our lessons was you have to talk to a lot of people to get dates. And we want to enable Binyavanga Wainaina to say “Hi, may name is Kwani? to as many people as possible.”

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Audience Questions

Audience: How do you choose the writers, how do you find the writers?

Gary Dauphin: The Collectives started as a group of friends. We do intend to grow. We’re having an internal discussion about whether we’ll take anyone who wants to join or whether we’ll be more selective. There will be tiered access. It is possible for anyone who has a magazine to join the website. Whether these people will participate in ad sharing and shared revenues depends on the platform and the ecommerce model we use, and we’re still figuring that out.

Michael Vasquez: Also, by reading a lot. And we share stories. So if a story isn’t right for me, I’ll say, but it’s right for Rob, and I’ll forward it on. On the website, I won’t be reading all 50,000 comments, but I’ll probably be looking at the top-rated comments, so that’s a way for aspiring writers to get themselves heard.

Audience: Is there going to be a workshopping component to the website?

Gary Dauphin: There is going to be a community aspect that allows people to give and to share feedback among themselves. I will be able to find not only everything Binyavanga Wainaina has put up, but I’ll be able to find any random user’s contributions. We’re using double opt-in email, so there will be a real identity tied into online identity, so we’ll be able to find these people.

Manon Ress: What’s the legal framework for there?

Achal Prabhala: That’s a good question. Kwani? has two lines on the inside front cover saying “do not reproduce.” Transition has two lines that say you can reproduce at will for non-commercial use, but if you’d like to reproduce for commercial use, please contact us. One of the things we have to figure out how to do is to make this contracting and licensing work. I suspect it will be less of a problem for areas where there is less of an institutionalized market for literature. I suspect it will be harder to work this out in the US and the UK, but we’re going to give it a shot.

Manon Ress: What happens if one of the members of the collective takes a bunch of the best material and sells it?

Achal Prabhala: Tinhouse is the only magazine we have where copyright reverts to the author. For the rest of us, there’s just a consensus that it’s going to work that way.

Manon Ress: I’d like to see the language for that agreement.

Michael Vasquez: I’d like to say a final word. This is part of a movement. Some of us have only recently come around to this idea, and the process of figuring this out and educating our writer is part of the process, it’s part of the movement.

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