What I learned about indefinite embargoes for practice-as-research/creative PhD’s
I was told that in the arts & humanities these are ‘rarely gone for and rarely won' - which made for quite a challenge.
While in an ideal world I’d’ve loved to have been able to be fully collegiate & share my work freely, in reality my commercial work (or rather, non-academic work) meant I needed to give embargoing my thesis a shot or risk never being able to publish either the writing or audio outside of academia.
Here’s what I learned in the process:
I learned that I was building a case & everything needed evidencing. i.e. what I felt didn’t matter, even about any future financial loss or its impact.
I learned how important relationships were in this process. It’s not lost on me that without the support of my supervisor & agent, who both wrote clear & direct supporting statements, the embargo wouldn’t’ve been approved… & I really mean that… there’s an infantilising aspect of academia that requires people ‘higher up’ than you, even at this level, to validate requests.
I learned that while situationally the burden of proof fell on me, in actuality it ought to be on the university to prove I made the work using their money & resources (for interest: I hadn’t).
I learned that it was really important that I hadn’t ticked the checkbox saying I was happy for my work to be available under open access. If I’d checked this box at the beginning of my degree, there’d’ve been no grounds to apply for an embargo.
I learned that I could’ve easily missed this open access tick box' thinking it was just a formality I had to check. This box would’ve been me ok-ing making publicly funded work available to the public (which is important). Mine wasn’t publicly funded & I had plans for what happened to those ideas, so I had to read around about what this box meant & whether to check it or not.
I learned that if you self-fund, you own your work, even though, apparently, through the lens of general educational establishments they do. I’m not sure I understand this!
I learned that I was yet again grateful for religiously keeping records/diarising everything, backing up emails, & cataloguing invoices & receipts too as it meant I could prove where & how I’d made the work if I needed to. I didn’t need to, but it made me feel safe, & that feeling & sense of security created a solid foundation from which to write the case.
I learned that remaining professionally active during my PhD had actually been fairly important, not only because I could prove I planned to continue being so (& because I had met my agent in this time), but also, more importantly, because I had 20 (yes, 20!) emails from publishers saying they wouldn’t publish my work if it was online elsewhere as it would undermine their sales. (It also helped my case that my agent hit the roof about algorithms).
I learned that the processes I was required to document in my thesis were IP Trade Secrets & were therefore protected under IP law.
I learned how uncomfortable and utterly humiliating it is to have to ask for what was (I felt) (…and is) rightfully mine, & the crushing powerlessness of so much of my future being in someone else’s hands… echoing again what happens in the viva & corrections approval process… & was just one powerlessness too much.
… & on that point I learned to sit with the fact that the embargo may not’ve been granted… that selling my work might’ve been off the table… that I might need a plan B, or at the very least a next step…. & would that be a commercial workaround (& if so, then what?), an appeal, or just plain starting over?… & sit with the worst-case scenario of starting over… with almost nothing… again…
I learned that I wasn’t really sure whether the commercial implications for practice-as-research PhD’s/academics had been fully thought through or implemented yet... & that no one’s talking about it (for obvious reasons), so it likely won’t be.
It made me wonder what happens to the work of other practice-as-researchers? What workarounds have you come up with? I understand some of you are partially-funded, how did things pan out in your situation?