from Anjali Vats

Anjali Vats presented the closing plenary, “Publishing for Racial Justice: A Meditation on Copyright Equity in Academic Publishing,” at the AUPresses 2022 Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. Her thesis: “Copyright law is a central modality through which inequity persists in the publishing industry specifically and academia generally due to 1) opaque contracts negotiated with large publishing firms, 2) regulated rights of distribution and circulation, with restrictive notions of copyright infringement and fair use, and 3) long periods of copyright protection that is historically and empirically structured in favor of white cishet males.” She challenged scholarly publishers to consider how these inequities operate in university press and academic journal settings as well as to find approaches to dismantle oppressive copyright practices.

Below she suggests resources on race and publishing for further reading/viewing.

Vats is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law with a secondary appointment in the Communication Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Her book, The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race and the Making of Americans (Stanford University Press, 2020), examines the relationship between copyright, patent, and trademark law, race, and national identity formation.

Bracha, Oren. “The Statute of Anne: An American Mythology. The CCC Conference: Celebrating Copyright’s Tri-Centennial Institute for Intellectual Property & Information Law Symposium.” Houston Law Review 47, no. 4 (2011 2010): 877–918.

“Building the Fugitive Academy” conference videos. Boston College, Institute for the Liberal Arts, March 5-May 7, 2021. Accessed June 30, 2022. https://www.bc.edu/content/bc-web/academics/sites/ila/events/fugitive-academy/schedule.html.

Cohen, Julie E. “Creativity and Culture in Copyright Theory Symposium: Intellectual Property and Social Justice: Copyright, Creativity, Catalogs.” U.C. Davis Law Review 40, no. 3 (2007): 1151–1206.

Coleman, Major G. “Racism in Academia: The White Superiority Supposition in the ‘Unbiased’ Search for Knowledge.” European Journal of Political Economy 21, no. 3 (September 1, 2005): 762–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2004.08.004.

Craig, Carys J. “Reconstructing the Author-Self: Some Feminist Lessons for Copyright Law Symposium: The Third Annual IP/Gender: The Unmapped Connections Symposium.” American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law 15, no. 2 (2007 2006): 207–68.

Dutta, Mohan. “The Whiteness of Capitalist Publishing Models: Decolonizing Conversations Must Interrogate the Economics of Publishing.” Culture-Centered Approach (blog), May 9, 2022. https://culture-centered.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-whiteness-of-capitalist-publishing.html.

Flores, Lori A., and Jocelyn H. Olcott. The Academic’s Handbook. Fourth Edition: Revised and Expanded. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.

Fyfe, Aileen, Kelly Coate, Stephen Curry, Stuart Lawson, Noah Moxham, and Camilla Mørk Røstvik. “Untangling Academic Publishing,” Discussion Paper, Birkbeck Institutional Research Online, University of St. Andrews, May 2017.

Gibson, Chris, and Natascha Klocker. “Academic Publishing as ‘Creative’ Industry, and Recent Discourses of ‘Creative Economies’: Some Critical Reflections.” Area 36, no. 4 (2004): 423–34. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0004-0894.2004.00242.x.

Gilley, Jennifer. “This Book Is an Action: A Case for the Study of Feminist Publishing.” International Journal of the Book 9, no. 1 (2012): 1–9. https://doi.org/10.18848/1447-9516/cgp/v09i01/36925.

Harker, Jaime, and Cecilia Konchar Farr. This Book Is an Action: Feminist Print Culture and Activist Aesthetics. Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015.

Hyland, Ken. Academic Publishing: Issues and Challenges in the Construction of Knowledge. Oxford Applied Linguistics. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Keller, Wiebke I. Y., Franziska Müller, Malik Stromberg, and Dominik Papies. “Gender Diversity in Academic Publishing—Comment on Galak and Kahn (2021).” Marketing Letters 32, no. 3 (September 1, 2021): 325–36. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-021-09579-3.

Krawczyk, Franciszek, and Emanuel Kulczycki. “On the Geopolitics of Academic Publishing: The Mislocated Centers of Scholarly Communication.” Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society 4, no. 1 (January 1, 2021): 1984641. https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2021.1984641.

Leung, Tin Cheuk, and Koleman S. Strumpf. “Discrimination in the Publishing Industry.” SSRN Electronic Journal, January 2022. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3660289.

Logan, Corina J. “We Can Shift Academic Culture through Publishing Choices.” F1000Research 6 (June 9, 2017): 518. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11415.2.

Long, Chelsea. “Few Black, Hispanic, and Native Researchers Are Getting Published.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 25, 2022. https://www.chronicle.com/article/few-black-hispanic-and-native-researchers-are-getting-published.

Matheka, Duncan Mwangangi, Joseph Nderitu, Daniel Mutonga, Mary Iwaret Otiti, Karen Siegel, and Alessandro Rhyll Demaio. “Open Access: Academic Publishing and Its Implications for Knowledge Equity in Kenya.” Globalization and Health 10, no. 1 (April 9, 2014): 26. https://doi.org/10.1186/1744-8603-10-26.

McGuigan, Glenn. “The Business of Academic Publishing: A Strategic Analysis of the Academic Journal Publishing Industry and Its Impact on the Future of Scholarly Publishing.” Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship 9, no. 3 (Winter 2008). https://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v09n03/mcguigan_g01.html.

Noda, Orion. “Epistemic Hegemony: The Western Straitjacket and Post-Colonial Scars in Academic Publishing.” Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 63, no. 1 (July 27, 2020). https://doi.org/10.1590/0034-7329202000107.

Nunn, Roger. “Addressing Academic Inequality: A Response in Support of Wen and Gao.” TESOL Quarterly 43, no. 4 (2009): 694–96.

Areo. “Perverse Incentives in Academic Publishing,” June 23, 2021. https://areomagazine.com/2021/06/23/perverse-incentives-in-academic-publishing/.

Piper, Andrew, and Chad Wellmon. “Publication, Power, and Patronage: On Inequality and Academic Publishing.” Critical Inquiry, July 2017. https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/publication_power_and_patronage_on_inequality_and_academic_publishing/

Saha, Anamik, and Sandra Van Lente. “The Limits of Diversity: How Publishing Industries Make Race.” International Journal of Communication 16 (2022): 1804–22.

Tehranian, John. “The Emperor Has No Copyright: Registration, Cultural Hierarchy, and the Myth of American Copyright Militancy.” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 24, no. 4 (2009): 1399–1460.

Teixeira da Silva, Jaime. “Rethinking the Use of the Term ‘Global South’ in Academic Publishing.” European Science Editing 47 (August 2021): e67829. https://doi.org/10.3897/ese.2021.e67829.

“View of Reinventing Academic Publishing Online. Part II: A Socio-Technical Vision | First Monday.” Accessed May 18, 2022. https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2642/2287.

Whitworth, Brian, and Rob Friedman. “Reinventing Academic Publishing Online. Part I: Rigor, Relevance and Practice.” First Monday, July 26, 2009. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v14i8.2609.

———. “The Challenge of Modern Academic Knowledge Exchange.” ACM SIGITE Newsletter 5, no. 2 (June 2008): 4–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/2388816.2388817.

Williams, Robert A., Jr. “Vampires Anonymous and Critical Race Practice.” Michigan Law Review 95, no. 4 (1997): 741-765. https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4316&context=mlr.

People of Color in Publishing. “Workplace Racism Survey.” Accessed June 24, 2022. https://www.pocinpublishing.com/workplaceracismsurvey.

Yen, Alfred C. “Copyright Opinions and Aesthetic Theory.” Southern California Law Review 71, no. 2 (1998 1997): 247–302.