0.11 Response to roger bagnall paper: integrating digital papyrology  (Page 3/10)

Consider, next, the matter of control. In the traditional world three things are yoked together: authorship of materials; the assurance given by the author of the quality of the materials (often supported by peer review); and the control of those materials, in the form of the right to authorize publication of the material. At the center of this nexus is the academic author. He or she creates the work, warrants its quality, and decides who may publish it, where and when.

This model, which has worked so well for the academic world for centuries, is a recipe for disaster in the digital world. Bagnall describes very well the conflict between the “ist mein” mentality and collaboration in an open-access environment: between the imperatives of academic ownership and the open-ended partnerships characteristic of, and enabled by, the digital medium. I can speak with great feeling on this. As many of you know, for the last twenty years I have been pursuing for the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales what Bagnall and his collaborators are doing for papyrology. The project has achieved much: most visibly, seven CDs published between 1996 and 2006. We have three more CD-ROMs ready to publish and we have a mass of other work contributed by project partners that we wish to continue working on. Most of all, we have complete transcripts of around 40 percent of all the manuscripts of the Tales ready to go online. This represents the work of some twenty or more scholars, at various levels, and a large amount of funding. But for the last five years, the project has been paralyzed. We cannot publish the CD-ROMs we have ready; we cannot publish online all the materials we have. This is because two people who worked on the transcripts of key manuscripts ten years ago have persuaded their university to withhold agreement for us to publish materials they worked on. The point at issue is not whether they or their university are right or wrong to do this: they clearly feel they have good reason for their actions, and their university supports them. The point is that the traditional model of academic ownership gives control over the work done—the right to say who may publish—to the academic who made the work. This is excellent for print publication, where the publication is the end of the work, in every sense. Once we have the book in hand, the materials used to create it (the transcripts, apparatus, piles of index cards) are of little or no interest or use to anyone. But this is most manifestly not the case for digital work. Of course, it will be useful to publish the transcripts online and on CD-ROM, just as they are, and for people to keep looking at them for years to come. But we now know that the transcripts can be far more useful than this: they can be used as the base for decades more work by other scholars, who might modify them, elaborate them, correct them, add more and more to them, republish them, as the shifting world of scholarship determines. This is the same model that prevails in the open source software world, and which has spawned the Creative Commons movement.