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Interview with David Parry

Your keynote speech at the recent Computers and Writing 2012 conference hosted by NC State University was titled "Ending Knowledge Cartels." Who are the members of these cartels?

The term "knowledge cartels" is one I borrow from Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite in their book "Information Feudalism." Broadly speaking they use this term to talk about any institution which profits from excessively restricting the flow of information, extracting rent anytime information is shared, whether that is in the form of music (as is the case in the music industry) or the current patent regime (that attempts to severely limit what type of innovation and product development takes places. In the modern information economy these cartels are growing increasingly powerful having substantial negative effects on our society. We could talk about drug cartels as those that profit from trafficking in illegal drugs, or drug cartels that profit from restricting the flow of life saving medication, both are structurally pretty similar.

In the academic context what we have seen is a move towards giving away our intellectual labor to these cartels for free, who then turn around and profit from selling that product. The most concrete example of this in the humanities context are the publishers whose cost and thus profit margins continue to increase. In one sense we could talk about the big journal companies like Elseveir or Routledge, but I also think some of the University Publishers are also complicit in this model, for example Oxford's new policy that you designate your writing as work for hire, giving them even greater control over your work.

You have stated that breaking up these knowledge cartels in order to move toward open scholarship is a moral issue. Why?

As I said in the talk, there are clearly economic issues here, and those alone would warrant a move to open access as the recent Harvard Librarian letter indicated. But for me the issue is larger. In terms of drug patents this is easy to see, academics take public funds to develop life saving medical technologies, then sell that research to companies which then profit from the drug, restricting the flow of the drug to those who might need it most, but can't afford it. People die because of this model, so it's easy to see there. But if we imagine that what we do as humanities scholars serves a crucial role in society (that a healthy society requires a robust public critical discourse) then to restrict access to this conversation (which in part is funded via public money) is unethical. Knowledge rights are human rights. I am an academic because I believe that.

You call for collective action to overcome the knowledge cartels in the academy. What are a few steps we can take in this direction?

Well I closed my talk with these ten possible solutions. And then posted them to my blog, which you can see at http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2012/ending-knowledge-cartels/. So I will just highlight what I think are the most important. First is to creative commons license everything we do, preventing the rent extracting behavior of these knowledge cartels, in effect giving our work away to the public for free rather than to these cartels for free. The second is to stop supporting these cartels in any fashion, no peer review, no editing, no serving on boards. Of course the corollary to this is to support Open Access journals. Finally to be public about these choices, because this is a collective action problem, the more public we are about these choices the more it effects change.

What about instructors' syllabi, lesson plans, web pages, and teacher-created learning activities? Should they be open to everybody, rather than hidden behind the password- protected learning management systems (like Blackboard) touted by most educational institutions? If so, aren't many educators resistant to such a paradigm?

Don't get me started on Blackboard. Aside from being horribly designed enterprise software and a poor way to engage students, they profit extensively from public funds. I don't know for sure but my guess is they have more people in sales and marketing than they do in actually coding their product. So, yes, we should stop using them and as academics adopt open platforms. There are lots of excellent options here. Sure academics are going to be resistant but comfort, and ease are not excuses for poor pedagogy, which is again to say nothing of the moral choices here.

On the surface, your suggestion to fight knowledge cartels by "pirating" seems pretty radical. Can you elaborate on this idea, particularly as it applies to classroom teachers?

Radical, maybe, but morally its the right thing to do; these cartels are locking down public knowledge and profiteering on the backs of our students. In the terms of the classroom thing about how much money is spent on textbooks or other lesson plan type materials that are "proprietary." Really this benefits no one save these cartels, so lets start sharing our work with each other not them.

As we inevitably move toward a post print society, will some educators, especially those who are not digital natives, drag their heels and balk at the inevitable transformation from, as you express it, "an analog archive to one whose substructure is a digital network"?

Certainly, I think we see that in so many places. Old power structures do not often easily yield to new ones, especially when those in power would have to give up power to others, but that is not an excuse to resist change, indeed it is a call to be ever more vigilant about pursing it. So there will be some who benefit from the old system, and want to resist change, and there will be some who argue that this is the way things have always been done and there is no need to change.

But there is reason for hope, because I believe academics for the most part understand the problem here and want to figure out how to take advantage of the accordances of the digital network to share our work. And we see this already as many faculty now contribute to Open Access journals, or institutions like the MLA start to change the licenses under which they publish scholars work. So we are moving in the right direction, but as we move that way I think we can expect push back from these cartels and we will have to be prepared to fight back. But the good news is this is simply a collective action problem, the power is all on our side, as long as we chose to recognize this.