NCA will not reduce or waive high reprint fees

Music: Drive-By Truckers: The Big To-Do (2010)

While it seems the Betsy De-Bach-le has gone dormant, this doesn't mean the Executive Director of my professional organization, the National Communication Association, refrains from bad judgment, and this time over for-profit reprint fees. Some years ago, NCA made a Faustian bargain with Taylor & Francis publishers (most known stateside for their Routledge outfit), who have significantly changed the publication game in the field.

Under T&F, authors of essays published in NCAs journals have lost many of the courtesy perks they used to receive (such as free issues of the journal one published in). I've also tangled quite a bit with T&F over copyright and have been tremendously frustrated: Mirko and I worked with Apple, Inc., for almost three months to secure the rights for reprinting an iPod advertisement, only to have it fall through because T&F kept asking for ever more clearances; the deal-breaker was T&F's insistence Apple, Inc. give them rights to reprint the advertisement for perpetuity in any of their "collections" and what not. Working with Apple was complicated, but after tracking down the model, her agency, Apple's art people, the graphic artists, and Apple HQ (all of whom signed off on the reprint) to have T&F ask for one more hurdle (and thus a new round of signatures with all these people) was infuriating, to say the least.

But I digress. My friend and colleague Chuck Morris is helping to sponsor a bill that corrects Executive Director's decision to let T&F hike reprint/copyright fees to an untenable level (that is, her decision not to exercise the power of her office to keep these rates reasonable). I think one could argue for higher fees were my field bigger and much more endowed than it currently is; our conference is 6,000-8,000 tops---and the field isn't that much larger. If we were political science, higher fees could be sustained. But "readers" or edited collections drawn from NCA journal articles for rhetoric in communication studies are very targeted, and in general, there's no profit to be made. Hiking reprint fees is just going to make it that much harder to get edited collections and readers drawn from the field.

So, this is a long-winded way to say I fully support Chuck's resolution, which will be introduced at the next legislative assembly. I encourage readers to take a look at the resolution. If you find yourself agreeing with the spirit of the resolution, I urge you to sign your support in the fields found at the bottom of the webpage.