“It was beautiful,” we hear. “We were selling their own fat asses back to them.”

This week, a powerful letter was distributed to all faculty of the financially-imperiled University of California system — the libraries of which are now faced with a 400% price increase if they would like to continue to provide access to 67 important scientific journals distributed by the Nature Publishing Group. One of these is NPG’s flagship journal, Nature. The price increase would bring the annual cost of a single NPG journal from approximately $4500 to over $17,000. When, in conversation today, I’ve shared this number with my librarian colleagues at home and abroad, I’ve heard a lot of incredulous laughter. But laughter turns to quiet musing (“would that work here?“) when I go on to say that the California letter threatens complete boycott, in clear terms and with the support of a system-wide advisory group on scholarly communication, of all UC faculty involvement in the production machine of the Nature group, if the costs for these journals cannot be brought in line with reality.

The UC/Nature story was covered swiftly and well by Jennifer Howard of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Her article was followed today by a set of must-read musings by Dorothea Salo, from the perspective of a repository librarian and open-access advocate. And, of course, all of this is contextualized by any number of scholarly committee and task force reports, and by the work of thinkers like Kathleen Fitzpatrick. I thought I had nothing to add, at this early stage of the UC system’s game. However, I’ve already noted enough bafflement on the part of humanities faculty and graduate students at the affair to think I should talk in a pithy way about Fight Club soap — and then share a conjecture about the bizarre, perennial surprise that seems to be attendant on these conversations.

The position in which libraries find themselves vis-a-vis Nature, Elsevier, et al is laughable — once you’ve shed a tear for all of the humanities collections (monographs and periodicals) that have already been cut in response to previous gouging by journal providers. Large companies have cornered the market on access to scientific research which universities see as mission-critical, and can therefore name their own prices. The first victims of the hard decisions forced on collections stewards at many institutions have been less costly, lower-profile, slow-knowledge, lower rate-of-use, disorganized and a la carte humanities publications — with the dire results we have seen across the academy over the last decade. Libraries have cancelled standing orders with university presses. Many presses and journals, having lost their best (sometimes almost only) clients, have responded by reducing the number of worthy book manuscripts and articles that make it into print. Others have folded entirely. A generation of humanities scholars, still struggling to meet the “or perish” tenure and promotion expectations of a bygone era, feel they have nowhere to publish. Students and faculty have lost access to whole threads of our shared, cultural conversation — conversation that continues in humanities publications their schools now cannot afford. Other threads (genres of work, areas of inquiry) have been cut short entirely.

Ready to laugh again? Let’s look at the statistics provided by the California Digital Library in its letter to faculty, and then let’s talk about soap. Articles published by UC faculty in NPG’s flagship journal, Nature, numbered 638 over the past six years. And that’s just Nature. Sixty-six other journals are part of NPG’s proposed rate hike. Approximately 5,300 articles by UC faculty have appeared in them in the same timeframe. But that’s not the kicker. Pause now for a moment to imagine the countless, unquantifiable hours of UC faculty labor that have gone not only into the research for and writing of these articles — but also into their vetting. How many UC faculty have spent how many hours engaged in peer review or serving on advisory committees to the journals that their libraries now cannot afford? How much intellectual labor already paid for by the University of California system is now being sold back to UC’s own libraries at exorbitant costs? How much Fight Club soap are we willing to buy?

And how long have we all seen this train wreck coming?

I’m a humanities PhD who has worked in an administrative position in a major research library for nearly three years. I’m still new enough to feel productive cognitive dissonance and the occasional wave of culture shock. Often this centers, for me, around the beautiful service ethic of librarians, and their desire to make things easy, and make things work for the faculty and student researchers they serve. It’s a different kind of monasticism from the “life of the mind” for which I was trained, but I recognize devotion of all sorts, and I bet you do, too.

There is, however, a distinct danger in this impulse — to provide a level of self-effacing service that does not distract the researcher from his work. With the best of intentions, it can lead to a strategy of hiding the messy stuff, or laying a smooth, professional veneer over increasingly decrepit and under-funded infrastructure. And then there’s the degree to which the service mentality prevents librarians from engaging with faculty as true intellectual partners — developing the kind of relationships that foster frankness. (Of course, we need to be met half way. Why is it that librarians’ advocacy for open access initiatives has provoked such discomfort among faculty at so many institutions that the word on the street is now: don’t speak up, don’t be pushy, know your place?)

Combined, these factors can mean librarians fail to blow the whistle on journal pricing and subsequent collections implications until it’s too late. (Witness the shock and anger of many faculty bodies at recent cancellations of humanities subscriptions or closures and consolidations of whole libraries at institutions around the country.) The University of California’s statement, its coverage in the Chronicle, and the open discourse that I hope it promotes among researchers and librarians is a great social positive — even beyond the impact I predict it will have on pricing models by monopolistic journal providers and the visibility it will provide for open-access alternatives like those outlined in the UC letter. We shouldn’t let this crisis go to waste, or overlook what it can reveal about the way we work together in higher ed.

We’re in untenable and intertwingled positions, all of us. I advocate the talking cure. Why should the first rule of Journal Club be, for librarians and faculty alike, not to talk about Journal Club?

I’ve decided to spend my 10 minutes of introduction on the MLA convention’s “Links and Kinks” panel indecorously – in opening conversation about one of the least genteel, least talked-about aspects of collaborative work in the digital humanities. I’ve been active in this community of practice for 14 years – and can count on one hand the number of interchanges I’ve had about these issues that were both unguarded and productive.

The policy issues related to institutional and academic status that I want to put before the panel are so uncomfortable that they tend to make good-hearted, collaborative folks like all of you behave as if they can be wished away – as if they’ll shrivel up and die if they are studiously ignored. But here, as in other areas of the academy, benign neglect is bad behavior. Consciously ignoring disparities in the institutional status of your collaborators is just as bad as being unthinkingly complicit in the problems these disparities create. This is because of the careless way your disregard reads to the people it damages. These people are: your junior colleagues; your graduate students; academics on the “general,” “administrative,” or “research faculty;” the lost souls euphemistically referred to as “contingent labor;” and the lowest of the low, members of your institution’s staff: those of your collaborators who are classified as service personnel. This latter group includes programmers, sysadmins, instructional technologists, and credentialed librarians and cultural heritage workers.

There is another reason, beyond discomfort, that we don’t really talk about how status factors in collaborative work. The people best positioned to articulate the personal and professional impact of HR and academic research policies either can’t afford to make trouble, or quite rightly fear they’ll lose the little bit of collegiality they’ve earned from you, the faculty, if they publicly align themselves with the wrong side of the equation. You’ll rarely hear them yelling about the violence inherent in the system.

Because they highlight the degree to which new works of scholarship are the work of many hands, the digital humanities bring into focus any failure to acknowledge our collaborators appropriately (by which I do not mean merely “to acknowledge them at all”). And it is in the digital humanities that I believe we will have our first and best opportunity to address inappropriate and counter-productive academic policies relating to intellectual property. These policies are – in my varied experience as a graduate student, a post-doc, a senior member of the research faculty at an R-1 institution, and (now) a higher ed administrator – where the rubber hits the road.

I hail from the University of Virginia. “Monopolies of Invention,” the title of my talk, is from a highly relevant passage of writing by UVA’s founder, Thomas Jefferson. Its explication will be left as an exercise to the reader.

Several of my own past projects, including projects in the literary field, have done a delicate dance with our IP policy in Jefferson’s “academical village.” These policies require that we disclose inventions or innovations (including the development of new software or digital humanities methods) to a governing body that will determine whether they should be patented and monetized. As a disclosure incentive, the person designated “inventor” is offered some portion of potential profit, which is owned by the University if the work was done using “significant University resources.” Significant resources are anything that goes much beyond a low-end laptop, electricity in your office, and the brainpower of a teaching faculty member. As a determining factor in the patent process, the “significant resource” designation certainly kicks in when general faculty and staff reporting to me, in my role as director of a digital humanities lab and department within our library system, collaborate with teaching faculty on scholarly projects.

By some interpretations of the policy, I may well owe this governing body conversations about four different collaborations we’ve undertaken with English Department faculty in the past year alone: projects that use technology to teach poetic scansion, analyze 19th-century biographies of women, data mine 18th-century texts for metaphor, and present searchable audio files of William Faulkner lectures. I frankly don’t often talk with faculty about patent policy before we start working with them, because it would scare them all away. Instead, I rely on my sad ability – if called upon — to convince local arbiters that innovations in the digital humanities are fundamentally worthless, and that we should get a pass. I don’t think this is good institutional practice.

The intellectual property system in universities is geared toward big profits from big pharma, not little websites on prosody. My happiest conversations with our Library’s brilliant IP lawyer happen when a project’s grant money comes with strings that absolutely require open source code and open access content, no matter who contributed to its construction. All of the Mellon Foundation’s grants do, now, for instance, and that’s what saved the NINES project some huge headaches. The open-access mandate of the NIH is bringing this approach to federally-funded medical research. What would it take to expand the mandate to the NEH? If you value open access and the liberties it grants to your collaborators, you should explore this issue with the funders of your research.

I’ll shift now, not without significant discomfort, to a more specific example from the intellectual property dirty-laundromat: a project from my past. This project was of keen interest to a large community of users, was hugely provocative in the challenges it posed to theory and method in its field, and was ready for implementation, — but it has lain fallow for many years even though most of its team wanted to take it forward. I was one of those people. Why did it die? It died because the professor who served as PI on the project’s grant experienced a waning of interest after we exhausted our first round of funding and hit proof-of-concept.

This kind of thing happens a lot and is, frankly, not a big deal. Waxing and waning of interest among collaborators is just a part of the scene, and the digital humanities community has largely found ways to work around this natural consequence of life beyond the lone-scholar model. (The broad survey Dot Porter and I have conducted of times of transition and decline in digital projects confirms this, and we will share our results this summer.)

So, if losing a key collaborator doesn’t automatically spell doom for a digital humanities project, what was the problem? The problem was this professor’s assertion of a right — granted to lead faculty members on collaborative research projects by our institutional policies — to intellectual property over the whole concept of our shared work.

I do not wish to sound ungrateful for the experience I gained on this project; it was a transformative period in my intellectual and technical growth, and in my growth as a pragmatist, which is to say a higher-ed administrator. Friendships are intact, and in fact – years later – we are amicably poised for a revival of the project with new partners. But my institution failed me in allowing a collaborative digital humanities effort central to my scholarship to be treated like a patent-able widget created by a sole inventor. The contributions of all team members besides the sponsoring faculty member fell under the category of “work for hire,” no matter how intellectually rich and critical to the project these contributions were. Our programmer and designer felt like they had no leverage at all to argue against this system. And what about me, the person who had conceived and designed a software approach to our research problem and had shepherded all aspects of the software’s development? I chickened out and did not press the matter. What grad student facing her dissertation defense would do more?

Now, years later, the patent, copyright, and intellectual property policies that governed this incident are somewhat more refined. Although “work for hire” is still a major factor for determining the right to ownership of software and ideas, our institution also now offers delicate and charming guidelines for when you, as a faculty member, may classify your collaborators as “a pair of hands” or as merely “an information provider.”

We should stop now to remind ourselves that digital projects require serious investments of energy and critical thought by expert collaborators who did not train in the same way we did and emerge (or diverge) from our conventional paths. Faculty collaborators and graduate students are part of our teams, but even they come increasingly from other departments and schools with different norms. Or they’re English Department grads who set out on unforeseen trajectories. And, often, our research and development groups are not only interdepartmental and ad-hoc, but also include undergraduate and professional-school students, designers and programmers both within and beyond higher ed, computer systems administrators, administrators of less holy sorts, and professional librarians or other instructional technology and information specialists.

The scholars I’ve known who are most obviously at school when working with programmers and other digital humanities collaborators invariably break new ground. That is to say, in my experience, the most productive and interesting collaborations are grounded in a kind of intellectual egalitarianism, or openness to the contributions of all team members.

However, this does not mean that the social boundaries inherent in digital project-work can or should be ignored. Policies about intellectual property and open source impinge differently on the rights and responsibilities of teaching faculty, research faculty, students-as-students, students-as-employees, and staff members of all kinds. These groups may have differing career arcs and intellectual agendas, and their participation in projects is often understood and evaluated differently within their professions and disciplines. If you do nothing else after this conversation, I hope you’ll go home and read your local policies with an eye toward how they work for the people with whom you collaborate.

We may worry that acknowledging cultural and administrative distinctions in the academy will reify them – but, in fact, ignoring differences can result in much poorer outcomes for our projects and personnel – particularly for the increasing number of collaborators who fall into hybrid professional categories. What do we do with those people whose training, research, and publication profiles do look exactly like ours, but whose right to claim intellectual property in the work they undertake as an equal partner is curtailed because of their status in the university’s HR system? The “ignore it and it’ll go away” strategy has not been helpful.

The biggest question for you may be how you’ll open potentially awkward conversations about status in a way that strengthens your team, creates – rather than limits – opportunity, and permits the kind of fluidity and professional growth we all want to foster over the course of long-term, collaborative initiatives.

[Note: this presentation and the larger conversation in which it participated at MLA was later described by Jennifer Howard in the Chronicle of Higher Education.]