Wednesday, March 19, 2014, 2:00-5:30 p.m. in Grand Ballroom IV, JW Marriott Indianapolis
We warmly invite all CCCC conference attendees to the annual open meeting of the Caucus on Intellectual Property and Composition/Communication Studies (CCCC-IP). During this meeting, we welcome scholars with questions and concerns about intellectual property to join us in discussions of how intellectual property affects the work of scholars, teachers, and students in our field.
The IP Caucus is the public and open counterpart to the work of the CCCC Committee on Intellectual Property. Since its founding in 1994, the caucus has explored IP issues pertinent to our academic field and beyond, including the following:
- plagiarism and authorship
- student and teacher rights related to intellectual property
- copyright and copyleft as they relate to scholarship and teaching
- best practices in teaching students and instructors about intellectual property issues
- open access and open-source policies
- contemporary issues in intellectual property, such as corporate surveillance and collection of user metadata (as related to scholarship in composition and communication)
This year’s interactive, action-focused meeting includes a breakout session into four roundtable groups. Each roundtable group, led by a facilitator, will discuss a particular set of IP issues in order to elicit practical solutions, action plans, lobbying strategies, and the production of documents for political, professional, and pedagogical use within the CCCs and beyond. Near the end of the meeting, the roundtables reconvene to share their discussions, plans, and recommendations for future action.
This year’s Caucus will feature four roundtables:
1. Legal and Legislative Developments
A roundtable focused on finding ways to safeguard the ability of students and teachers to make appropriate use of copyrighted material in furtherance of legitimate educational goals. In previous years, this roundtable included discussion of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), and court cases relevant to the educational community (such as the lawsuit involving Georgia State University’s use of electronic reserve materials for educational purposes).
2. Sharing IP Stories: Teaching IP, Copyright/Copyleft, and Openness
A place for participants to share stories, resources, and successful pedagogies for teaching the complex and overlapping issues of intellectual property, plagiarism, and copyright in composition classes. Participants will also be invited to join in planning ways to distribute these pedagogies, as voices that can counteract the rhetoric of fear and criminality pervading discourse on IP.
3. Advocating for Open Access in Composition Studies
A roundtable focused on identifying strategies that teachers and scholars might use to foster greater use of and acceptance of Open Access practices—especially given the academic/economic climate of rising subscription fees for scholarly journals and initiatives for the privatization of public knowledge. In previous years, this roundtable discussed issues such as funding concerns associated with scholarly publication (including attention to OA-aligned imprints such as CCDP and Parlor Press that publish composition scholarship), the impacts of and frequencies of citation of articles in our field, and possible lobbying strategies for OA practices.
4. Evolving IP Policies for Journals
This roundtable updates participants on the latest publisher policies and their potential impact on Writing Studies. Since science-oriented journals tend to influence the academic publishing community as a whole, this year’s roundtable will focus on the following issues: 1) new IP policies from publishers of scientific journals in relation to the rise of distributed, open-access venues for displaying data; dealing with greater numbers of authors; a perceived rise in scientific fraud cases; and new templates for article formats and 2) some journal publishers’ policy of requiring copyright permissions to be secured for article epigraphs, which treats these epigraphs as different from quotations analyzed within the body an academic article.
For more information about the IP Caucus, we invite you to visit the IP Reports section of the CCCC web site. We also invite you to meet members of IP Caucus through Tim Amidon’s (Spring 2013) digital piece “Spotlight on Intellectual Property: An Interview with Members of the CCCC IP Caucus” in issue 17.2 of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy.
For more information about the CCCC IP meeting, contact this year’s meeting organizer and senior chair of the IP Caucus: Dr. Kyle Stedman, assistant professor of English at Rockford College, at kstedman@rockford.edu or on Twitter @kstedman. You can also contact the IP Caucus’ junior chair, Tim Amidon, PhD candidate at University of Rhode Island, at timothy_amidon@mail.uri.edu or on Twitter @timothyamidon.
