Are literary studies and composition studies distinct in how they preserve and disseminate knowledge in the field?
Think of what is “preserved” on the literature side: published texts, typescripts of drafts, letters from or to famous authors. Hundreds of special collections and archives house such items. As a literary scholar, I’ve worked with archival materials in Harvard, Austin, Tulsa, and Princeton, and marvel at the steps taken to preserve texts and to control distribution, since the value of each single piece of paper stems from its one-of-a-kind status. You need permission from the copyright holder; you need identification from the archive; you cannot bring items into the reading room, so pencils and yellow paper are provided. Laptops are permitted but searched; and you are searched both going in and coming out. You may request the librarians to bring up only a certain number of boxes (usually 5) at a time, and take only one file from a box at a time to your worktable. Your request for materials is made out in triplicate, and a record is kept so that any disruption in the materials can be traced to individual users. Xerox copies belong to the collection and must be surrendered at the library’s request. Scanning originals is, in my experience, not allowed. Trips to the lavatory are duly noted. Precious, invaluable texts.
Does the composition profession have the same interest in first preserving texts, mainly primary but also secondary, and then disseminating them? Obviously so, but our efforts have been haphazard at best, until very recently. Paradoxically, the best way, I believe, to preserve and disseminate publications and research data in composition is through the polar opposite of archival preservation: that is, through open access scholarship for texts produced by writing students and writing teachers – no less valuable than literary collections. Open access means free and unrestricted access to scholarly research and publications, a growing movement recently legitimized by universities like Cal Tech, the UC campuses, Stanford, MIT, and Harvard, where this past February, Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted a policy that requires faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles available free online.
Increasingly, scholars and legislators are being pressured to make available data resulting from public grants. This year Congress approved the revised Labor Health and Human Services (LHHS) appropriations bill including a directive for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) requiring investigators to deposit their final papers in PubMed Central. Papers will then be available within a year after publication.
On the literature side, there has been little movement toward open access. There are few open-access journals, with fulltexts and bibliographies locked up in the MLA Bibliography, JSTOR, Project MUSE, Academic Search Premier, and so on. I should note that this trend may change soon, since more and more literary texts are becoming digitalized (via Amazon’s Kindle, etc). But on the literature side there still lingers that same mentality of archives – deliberate control and limiting of access. Traditionalists in our English departments avoid Open Access scholarship because of concerns about prestige or promotion / tenure. But the accessibility of knowledge doesn’t diminish its value, in this case.
Wouldn’t it be advantageous for the composition profession to recognize and exploit the potential of Open Access? Think of the benefits: it can make dispersal of publications nearly instantaneous – one of the reasons why the scientific community has been so involved in the Open Access initiative. Open Access makes equal access a reality for all students and professors, not just those connected with libraries wealthy enough to subscribe to increasingly expensive print journals. Open Access often leaves the copyright in the hands of the author, not the publisher. And finally, Open Access creates an opportunity for innovative classroom research for our graduate students and for ourselves.
Perhaps the first step in composition, in a conscious and strategic approach to the question of how to preserve and disseminate knowledge, is to realize the value of the texts we ask students to produce as well as the value of our own research and publications.
OA Repositories in North America: <http://www.opendoar.org/countrylist.php?cContinent=North%20America>
Facts about Open Access: A Study of the Financial and Non-financial Effects of Alternative Business Models for Scholarly Journals – Sponsored by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and HighWire Press/Stanford University. Additional data contributed by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).Full report available in pdf format at http://www.alpsp.org/publications/pub11.htm
See more information at <http://critical.tamucc.edu/wiki/OpenAccessGroup/> and see Denise Landry Hyde and Sarah Sutton: “Open Access, Scholarly Communication, and the Millennials.” Journal of Teaching Writing 23.3 (2007): 55-63.
Posted by Glenn on July 7, 2008
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