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Copyright chat is a podcast dedicated to discussing important copyright matters post therapists and the copyright librarian from the University of Illinois converses with experts from across the globe to engage the public with rights issues relevant their daily lives.
Copyright chat is pleased to announce that Niko Pfund is the guest for today’s episode. Niko Pfund is president of Oxford University Press USA and the global academic publisher for the press he joined Oxford University Press and the year 2000 after a decade at New York University Press during which he served as editor in chief and director. A graduate of Amherst College, he speaks widely on issues related to publishing and scholarly publication he lives with his wife and two daughters in Brooklyn New York.
Sara: Welcome Niko and thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.
Mr. Pfund: Happy to be here.
Sara: You are the president of the largest University Press in the world. Can you tell listeners how your career path developed along the way to lead you to that position?
Mr. Pfund: Of course. My career path basically developed I think as many people’s did in publishing, which was somewhat chaotically and unexpectedly. When I was an undergraduate I was enamored of the license a foreign correspondent I thought that would be an ideal way to mesh my interest in geopolitics and in writing or maybe I had just seen the Year of Living Dangerously once too often—but, I had read a lot of books by the poet and journalist Ryszard Kapuściński and I was very keen on trying to see if I could travel and write.
I applied for an internship with R.W. Apple Jr who was a columnist at The Times at that point and the internship then paid the princely sum I believe of $22,000 a year seemed, which like a fortune. I’d heard a lot from other journalists whom I’d spoken that any career in journalism required you to spend the first five years covering sewer board meetings and municipal politics and so forth and that seemed rather less exciting than some of the books I’ve been reading so it seemed like a great opportunity. Unfortunately, The Times cancelled the internship almost immediately after I applied for it and so I sent out a great many letters to people who looked like they had interesting jobs—those who had attended my alma mater and those who hadn’t–and one of them was a young woman who had just been named the Politics, Sociology, and Law Editor at Oxford University Press. And so I interviewed with her spring break and started a couple weeks after I graduated college and was there for about three years actually three years to the day and then moved to a smaller press about thirty blocks south, New York University Press, and spent a very happy decade there in the last three or four years as the director and editor in chief and then moved back to Oxford in two thousand and as the economic publisher and have been there ever since.
Sara: That’s a fascinating story and it just goes to show that networking can go a long way can’t it?
Mr. Pfund: I think it’s one of the things we’ve been really focusing on at Oxford over course of last year or so is trying to diversify our staff. I just got back from stint visiting a number of historically black colleges and universities and I was struck by how many publishers tend to focus their recruitment efforts at the entry level on the Boston to New York corridor. What I was really struck by during this trip is when you talk to people about what publishing involves, people don’t think about publishing necessarily as a career path and when they do, they have a somewhat skewed notion of it. Just talking to people about the way in which enables you to mix your interests in subject matter with a focus on a commercialism that revolves around the dissemination of quality information– when you frame it that way it tends to draw a lot more folks in. And I was really pleased by the degree of interest that was in evidence at some of these during some of these campus visits and conversations. So I think that we generally need to do a better job of representing what a publishing life looks like to people who might not necessarily come into contact with it very often.
Sara: Since this podcast is about copyright I thought I’d ask you about the intersection of copyright and publishing. From your perspective, what do you see as the biggest copyright challenge in the publishing industry?
Mr. Pfund: Now, where to begin? I think that copyright has obviously been much more in the news in the last decade or so I think than the previous 25. In the last quarter century or so most of the copyright issues arose when there were particularly high profile copyright questions around individual given works often of literature. I think in the last decade you’ve seen a great many controversies arising about different kinds of usages that revolve around the digital dissemination and use of copyrighted materials and I think that there are a great many perspectives swirling around copyright these days, but I think there’s one thing that almost everybody can agree on and that’s that current copyright law is really not ideally suited for the current environment. I think it’s safe to say when people are reading the current copyright laws they did not imagine an environment such as the one that we’re currently in. And I think that a lot of people across the library industry across the authorship communities and across publishing struggle to try to ascertain exactly who can do what and how.
In terms of the biggest copyright challenges I think what I found as a real struggle is trying to marry up a lot of the talk and the ideology around notions of access. Of course, as a university press that is a mission based institution access, to us, is our lifeblood. It’s really what we exist to try to increase and enhance.
But, I think that sometimes the questions of access get treated more in headlines than in terms of actual on the ground realities. I think one of the ways in which that is most in evidence is if you look at a lot of the discussions around open access. Open access is a recent movement, which is entirely defensible and makes a great deal of sense I think to everybody, which is that people should have as much access to information as is possible. Where this came about was first and foremost in the scientific medical community where a lot of researchers didn’t like the way in which there were paywalls that were put up on their research. What they have created or have helped institute is a system whereby an author or researcher can essentially pay a publisher for the services rendered in terms of disseminating that article: so editing it, getting it reviewed in terms of ensuring that the quality is good before actually is released. Providing the publisher a certain amount of money to do that and then at the point of dissemination the content is free. If you look at publishers through the prism of business models every publishing company is arguably a kind of intellectual venture capitalist. Each book or each… whether if you’re an academic publisher, or say a journal or a reference service it’s essentially a start-up: you invest a great deal early on or in the case of the individual book sometimes not a huge amount, but you hope then, downstream, that enough people will be interested that you can recoup your investment. This takes that model and essentially inverts it so that the financial transaction comes at the beginning and then downstream things are free.
My worry about that is not at all in terms of the way in which that has been applied in the scientific and medical research community because I think there it’s uncontroversial–it’s been institutionalized for a number of years now and it’s all going fine. I think where the danger arises is when you apply that model to the humanities and social sciences. I think generally speaking it’s safe to say that disciplines in those areas have less money–there’s less patent money available to those disciplines, for instance—they don’t really generate funds per se for the university. So the idea that authors who are specialists in romance languages or sociologists or what have you have access to those sorts of funds–they can’t dip into a lab budget or into a research fund and simply take that money to enable dissemination of their content. So my worry is that what happens is that you have essentially this two tier system. So that’s a kind of a systemic answer to your question with respect to copyright challenges, but I do think that in terms of the overall way in which my community and I think the academic community writ large is engaging with copyright that seems to me that the biggest structural question.
Sara: That’s a really interesting perspective–that there is more of a crisis in the publishing industry in the humanities than in the scientific fields. I think that’s accurate.
Mr. Pfund: Yeah, and I think you also have a system where for many, many years libraries engaged in a completist approach to their collections. The notion was that you had people who were managers in certain areas or disciplines or subject matter and they were then tasked with creating a local collection for that research community—their library and their constituent scholars at a given campus to make sure that it was a well-rounded collection. And, for decades publishers were generally not very good, which is to say actually quite bad, at estimating numbers of books in print–they were bound by the economies of scale such that they would print a thousand copies or choose your number in order to have not spent so much on a given book that it was prohibitive so you had to price it at a prohibitive level. As a result what would happen if you were selling twenty five or thirty copies of a book every year presses just would not reprint. Many presses waited until they had what was known as back orders, which is existing orders for a given book, before they would reprint. And that was an incredibly frustrating environment for first and foremost readers and authors, many of whom have spent years working on a book and it’s available for three or four years and then suddenly it’s not available for often an indefinite period of time. That was a source of enormous friction between the author community and the research and library community on the one hand and presses on the other. What we’ve seen in recent years is the advent of digital printing technology which enables presses to literally print single books at a time and that has meant that, in the term of business fill rates, the percentage of people who come to you and request something and that you were able to provide it to them then, right then, the fill rates have gone through the roof.
And that has been an incredibly positive development and it’s been to some extent largely overlooked I think in the welter of press around e-books and all the various digital developments that we’ve seen–this is a somewhat more prosaic development, but it has had an enormous impact on long tail publishers such as Oxford University Press.
Sara: That’s a good point as well that this print on demand that we’re in with digital availability of quick printing of books is really helpful in niche markets. For instance, I think copyright is really exciting, but maybe if I write a book about it, not everyone would agree.
Mr. Pfund: Well, I think copyright as, in my experience, is not necessarily intrinsically interesting. What’s more interesting are the ways in which copyright is brought to bear. I think that one of the ways in which the narrative of copyright has tended to exist is a David and Goliath narrative, where you have a large corporate entity that is engaging behavior that people find objectionable and that is at the expense of a David versus a Goliath.
I think we’ve seen in a great many complications of that in recent years. One of the examples that comes immediately to mind is the way in which Larry Lessig, the Stanford University law professor, who had historically taken on cases very much of that David and Goliath type at one point took action against Steven Joyce I believe it was who is the heir and the manager of the estate of James Joyce. And I believe, I think I have this right that, Lessig’s contention was that tight way in which the Joyce estate was being managed was actually having a repressive impact on the ability of scholars to engage in Joyce studies. And that, I thought, was quite interesting because it again it kind of exploded notion of a big guy versus or big press, big corporate publisher versus small guy.
But, as with everything else, I think as a species human beings respond to anecdote and to narrative and the way in which I think to get to these copyright systemic questions around copyright is often through individual cases, individual examples. So that’s where I think copyright law per se is not necessarily all that interesting, but the application of copyright and the different circumstance in which it arises I think that’s something that is endlessly interesting.
Sara: I have to agree with you there–I find copyright interesting in both senses myself. Do you have any advice for authors who are trying to work with university presses and are running into copyright issues. And, what is your view as a university press about fair use? Do you require authors to get express permission for every single source they use or is fair use part of your repertoire?
Mr. Pfund: Fair use is definitely part of our repertoire not only as a publisher in terms of our interactions with authors, but also as a publisher in our interaction with other rights holders. So, I think, certainly when it comes to the way in which fair use can have a restrictive impact on the pursuit of certain disciplines I am a very strong advocate of fair use.
I’m reminded, for instance, many years ago there was a book that I worked on called Extremism in America–this was when I was at N.Y.U. There was an article The New York Times about an archive of manifestos–extremist political manifestos that was housed, I believe, in the University of Kansas. And there was a carpenter his name was Laird Wilcox and he had spent his life as a hobby essentially collecting manifestos from various extremist organizations on all parts of the political spectrum. And there was a political science professor at the University of Missouri Kansas City named Lyman Terra Sargent who is quoted in the article saying this is the single most important trove of extremist manifestos in the country. So I just wrote him a quick note and said, would you be interested at all in possibly editing that archive down to a manageable volume that would have representative manifestos from all parts of the political spectrum and he was enthusiastic and so we proceeded to contract.
I spent, over course of the next couple of years, a lot of time corresponding with some of the most reprehensible, in some cases, and just unusual people I’ve ever come into contact with and because the intent here was to have a representation across the political spectrum. I was corresponding with people everywhere from the John Burke Society to the people who had been active in lesbian separatist movements during the sixties and seventies. And we were trying to get permissions from these various groups and individuals often who were camped in a small area in northern Idaho or what have you and it was a very fascinating experience in its own right, but the question also, at what point you decide that there is a fair use component when many of these people were no longer easily reached. So, we had to make a great many decisions about at what point had we made enough of an effort to actually locate the rights holder and at what point would be simply proceed.
But, I think the problem with fair use is because it’s so difficult to generalize. So, an excerpt from a book that would be fair use in one instance may not be fair use if that’s actually an excerpt from a piece of poetry or a song lyric. I was talking to professor at North Carolina A&T the other day and he said his book had been with the publishers for four years because it was about Jay Z, and he was having a hard time getting any response from Jay Z’s people about his request to use certain kinds of copyrights. Because, you know, if you’re an academic author, often you’re your requests just don’t enter into the universe–whether it’s a Hollywood studio a record label and, in my experience, if you ask for permission one of three things tends to happen: you get completely ignored despite repeated letters, or you’re told no because there’s no vested interest for a studio or a label to give you permission, or, if you plead your case very effectively, they will give you a permissions letter that says that you can use it for, you know, fifteen thousand dollars, which of course for an academic book is not a viable solution. So, the principles that one applies I think very widely from case to case.
We just had an example where we’re compiling some writings from a Pakistani extremist group that is, in the eyes of the U.S. government a terrorist organization, but they have a publishing house in Pakistan that disseminates their work and so we are not really in a position to request permission from an organization that is deemed to be a terrorist organization. So, we’ve had a lot of internal discussions as to whether or not we simply use those materials, what context we use those materials in, what sorts of prefatory comments we make before we would use those materials. So, each case is very different and that’s the maddening thing about fair use–is that you can’t really make very effective generalizations—but, I think we are quite active in trying to embolden our authors to take an expansive approach to fair use when it comes to including work–third party copyrighted work–in works of scholarship because, again, most of the monographs that we publish–these aren’t commercial entities in the traditional sense. No one’s making a lot of money off of these and they intend to advance knowledge, and so the idea that somebody would come after you because you’re including a portion of a copyrighted work in a book that’s going to sell six or seven hundred copies primarily into institutional libraries–I think people are quite nervous about that.
And I think one reason they’re nervous about it, not to go on here too long, is that fair use has come to encompass even something such as people taking entire books or large portions of books and putting them onto servers and providing access to students through those servers. And that’s something that we as a publishing community are in fact quite worried about because the effect relative to let’s say a pirate site like SCI hub which simply puts things up willy nilly with no regard whatsoever to copyright and, let’s say, an institution that is digitizing significant portions of books and essentially creating electronic course packs. That is something that would have a very detrimental impact on the higher education industry and many university presses–their lifeblood in addition to institutional library sales are these books that sell into seminars and upper level undergraduate courses and if those all were to move to a server with nobody buying the books then that would in fact have a very strong impact on our business model. Sorry, that was a very long answer your question.
Sara: Well I appreciate it–it was an interesting one, and I agree that university presses are part of the lifeblood of the university and we should protect them, but I also think that there is room for fair use in coursepacks and the Georgia State University case is ongoing–it will be interesting to see where that lines up. I agree that copying wholesale an entire book is a different story. To be continued on that front. I really hope I get to speak to you again soon–I hope the listeners enjoyed listening as well. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Mr. Pfund: Thank you very much for having me. Happy to come back anytime.
Music credit: http://www.bensound.com/royalty-free-music