No matter what my job as a scholar and pedagogue employed by the federal government might mean legally speaking, for my writing here at Vitia, it’s high time I performed/acknowledged/declared this rhetorical release, given what I believe about the uses of openness and (f)re(e)mix culture:
All original material posted hereafter, aside from comments owned by their respective commenters, is hereby released into the public domain.
Given that I’ve published here early versions of things that have made it into Pedagogy and JAC, I know that writing such a statement of release may in the future give me difficulties. And, well, that’s kind of a big part of the intent, dear reader: to let it go, and in so doing, to open it up to complication.
Release
Speaking of that JAC thang–if I didn’t say it before, let me say it now: it rocks! Perfect tone, excellent analysis.
Thank you! The biggest difficulty I had was with JAC’s injunction against invoking other texts in a review, but that injunction wound up being remarkably helpful in forcing me to translate all those economic concerns into my own language. (And Julie Jung is as critical and thoughtful a reader as one could possibly hope for.)
Who knows? Maybe Locke Carter might even respond here or elsewhere, and tell me what I got wrong, what I failed to address, and what I got right. I think it’d be an interesting conversation, given his MBA perspective and my grounding in heterodox economics from UMass.
I would be very interested in observing/participating in just such a conversation. Maybe the invocation of his name will get him here. Of course, I think that might work better wtih bloggers than non-bloggers. We’ll see?
All original material posted hereafter, aside from comments owned by their respective commenters, is hereby released into the public domain.
Yes, yes, yes.
Thanks, Bradley — it’s good to have some affirmation for what feels like a little bit of a scary move, a move that some folks have told me is a foolish and/or risky one to make for a n00b assistant professor, and I’m grateful. And I’m wondering if there are other folks out lurking and shaking their heads, looking at the publication process and saying to themselves: “Watch this fool take careful aim and shoot his academic career in the foot.” I think that what maybe we’re only starting to figure out, though, is that it’s professionally and scholarly a good thing to make it easy for people to use and recycle your intellectual property. To propagate; to disseminate.
All original material posted hereafter, aside from comments owned by their respective commenters, is hereby released into the public domain.
Nice move!
Then again, I’m a copyleft advocate. Sure we can’t persuade you to go that other route toward making texts available in the public commons? 😉
But seriously, I would be curious to know why you like public domain over open source style licensing. Just wondering–and I think it would be interesting to know in general–how people arrive at their choices between open source but not copyleft, copyleft, or just plain public domain.
It’s not so much a matter of liking, Charlie — I do, in fact, prefer the copyleft approach to use and acknowledgement. I’m making the move more because my institution insists (and I agree) that the scholarship I conduct as a component of my job is public domain, since it’s entirely paid for by taxpayers, and because I want to indicate that academic blogging can be understood as one form of scholarly work. So as long as I’m a federal employee and performing academic blogging qua scholarly work — inasmuch as we know that writing is a process and that blogging can be a form of generative writing that eventually becomes publicly published work with authorized academic value, and that it’s foolish to declare one form as worthwhile and another as not — this stuff is public domain. If I eventually wind up at another institution where my work isn’t compensated by federal tax dollars, I’ll likely switch back to a copyleft license.
Does that make sense?