Private Stock: Publishing for Private Circulation

Last week, I had an interesting conversation on The Social Media about the news that Taylor and Francis would be selling academic works published under their various imprints to a group who wanted to use them to train their AI. This situation was “shocking” to several of the academic authors on the thread, and this stimulated a conversation about how much control we have over our work once we’ve published it.

My understanding is that we have very little control over how our work is used. In fact, some of the move toward Open Access publishing is explicitly about giving “end users” greater control over the content of our work. There’s this idea that “information wants to be free,” and this seems to suggest to me that free information will tend to do what it wants to do. If this means that information that I produce goes on to contribute to a large language model that trains an AI bot, well, that’s just how things go sometimes. 

Of course, what the scholars on the thread probably meant was that publishers have a certain obligation to serve as good stewards of the material that they publish. While even the most attentive publisher can’t control what people who read our works do with that knowledge, we could reasonably hope that they don’t do things that encourage our work to be used in socially or politically compromising ways. That said, we also realize that most of our academic publications have razor thin margins and access to the massive production, distribution, and marketing power of these companies require us as authors to make certain sacrifices to maintain the viability of the institution.

Whatever one’s view on this particular situation, it got me thinking a bit about how the changing nature of academic publishing almost certainly influenced the changing expectations of control. Some of this is coming from the tension between the profits generated from academic labor and scholar’s very uneven access to this work. Some of this comes from a growing skepticism of the value of peer review. And some of this comes from the growth of digital publishing and the changing character of scholarly communication in the digital age. One thing that I’ve encountered as editor of North Dakota Quarterly is authors who don’t want their work to appear online at all. Since NDQ now appears on Project Muse, we can’t promise anything, but for most of them the pay-wall is sufficient to protect their work from inappropriate readers.

What I want to consider in this blog is the potential of private circulated books both to give authors a greater degree of control over their work and to side step some of the more problematic elements of contemporary publishing. 

I’ve toyed with the idea of a kind of “private stock” label which might focus on works that are not circulated by the press, but made available only via direct correspondence with the author. These works could range from deeply personal works (as I encounter from time to time with NDQ) to works on volatile topics, that court controversy, or are simply too provisional or exploratory for “prime time.” Privately circulating works would also be useful for scholars who lack tenure protections as pre-tenured or contingent faculty. Again, in our era where political (as well as other) sensitivities are quite raw one could imagine scenarios where a quietly circulated work to appropriate readers might be an appealing option.

Of course, it is possible to suggest that this would reinforce the echo-chamber that some critics have already seen as prevalent in academia. That said, I would suspect that most authors don’t mind critical readers or even people who object on methodological, theoretical, and ideological grounds. Engaging with these readers constructively is part of what academia does (even if it can get a bit heated at times) and it would be hard to imagine an author not sharing their work even with scholars who might be academically unsympathetic. (In fact, it’s always a bit of a rush to know someone who doesn’t really like your work nevertheless took time to read it.)

The other objection would be that this approach would limit the circulation of potentially important new knowledge. After all, doesn’t information want to be free? My sense of this is that many academic communities are fairly tight knit and it would be easy enough to circulate manuscripts to readers who would most benefit from the work. This is something that an individual scholar would have to weigh, of course. If the scholar’s professional network was too small for the work to circulate adequately or too fractious to be trusted with a volatile or provocative text, then a privately circulated book probably wouldn’t find enough interested and sympathetic readers to make an impact.

On the other hand, maybe there is a sufficiently strong commitment to the academic process and to academic conversation to ensure that a work circulated privately is read in the spirit that the author intended. Or even if the match between authorial intent and reader motivation isn’t perfect, it protects the work from being fed to a large language model or misrepresented in the politically charged media.

Of course, I know that privately circulated works are not the real solution to authorial control over our output. Perhaps more a realistic future involves authors and publishers working more closely both during the production process, but also after that process. I won’t go so far as to say that Taylor and Francis violated some kind of sacred trust — after all it would be naive to think that a for-profit publisher would not look to find new ways to turn academic works into profit — but it probably does create another thing for authors to consider when choosing a press.