As I’ve written here, I’m also the Editorial Director of The Headlight Review, a literary magazine produced in the MAPW program at Kennesaw State University. In the last couple years, we’ve been working hard to expand the magazine’s presence. We started a new section for feature writing, called the “High Beams,” added a new short fiction prize dedicated to Anthony Grooms, and we published a collection of the “Greatest Hits” from our first five years. Recently, we’ve been publishing micro-fictions and planning for next year’s special double issue of “New Southern Writing.”
A while back, a representative from EBSCO approached Headlight to ask if we’d be interested in signing up for a new database they’re building to package literary magazines for libraries. The “literary research database” offered to help grow our readership at no cost by scraping publications off our website and ingesting and then offering that database alongside a litany of other databases EBSCO sells to libraries in lucrative subscription contracts. At first, we were intrigued.
According to their flyer, which describes EBSCO as “The Natural Partner” thanks to their history servicing subscription magazines, the company “offers publishers a variety of ways to gain exposure for their publications in order to maintain and grow their core business.” Promising access to “more than 115,000 libraries worldwide,” “high usage of publications,” and “increase[d] web traffic,” it sounded like a great marketing opportunity, so we took a meeting with the representative, and they sent over the contract that structures the arrangement.
EBSCO, an acronym for the Elton Bryson Stephens Company, was founded in the forties by Elton and his wife, Alys, in Birmingham, Alabama. At first, the pair sold “magazines, personalized binders and racks to the U.S. Armed Forces under the name of Military Service Company.” The company went on to acquire a wide variety of enterprises related to the production and distribution of magazines, including “Metal Fabricators and Finishers” and dozens of magazines, presses, and distributors. Today, EBSCO “is one of the largest privately held companies in Alabama” and one of Forbes’s “top 200 [businesses] in the U.S., based on revenues and employee numbers.” Needless to say, a company of this size and hunger doesn’t offer promotional partnerships out of the goodness of their heart.
Now, The Headlight Review is an open-access, online publication. We don’t use paywalls or charge subscription fees, and the rights for everything we publish return to their authors upon publication. Reviewing our publication contract, we likely have the right to license the work we’ve published to EBSCO for use in this way, but ethically speaking we’d need to clear inclusion in the database with previously published authors and modify our contract with future authors to explain that THR would be a waypoint on the path to database distribution. The appeal of more attention notwithstanding, I wonder how most of our writers would feel about becoming EBSCO content.
From our perspective, it seemed like an awkward deal. Although we don’t charge for content, it struck us as a bit strange that EBSCO would be monetizing our work through library subscriptions without offering us anything but vague exposure. Further, the “system” they promised to use to obtain content from our website amounted to someone selecting “save as PDF” and uploading whatever the results, which often includes formatting errors and omissions. In other words, if we wanted high-quality representations of our work in the database, we’d need to reconstruct our workflow to build it ourselves. Doing yet more free labor on behalf of EBSCO. And, when it comes to exposure, the promise of more clicks through to our website, potential visits to our store, etc., evaporated when we learned that the database would simply include complete versions of everything we published. Leaving database users no reason to interact with THR beyond whatever piece they might find in the database.
We decided to pass on the deal, and I’m glad we did. A couple weeks ago, members of the Community of Literary Magazines and Small Presses began reporting they’d received an invitation from EBSCO to “engage with the growing field of generative AI in a secure and profitable way.” Apparently, EBSCO has
recently been approached by several GenAI companies seeking high-quality, licensed content to train their large language models (LLMs)—creating a new revenue stream for publishers without compromising control or risking misuse.
According to the message, journals’ “existing license agreement” with EBSCO means the content included in their databases qualifies for this program, which offers $0.0004 per word for non-Open Access journals and $0.0001 per word for Open Access journals should their content be selected to train an LLM at one of the “several GenAI companies.”
In a follow-up message, the EBSCO rep clarified that this was an optional program that database partners could choose to forgo. She also explained that
Our agreements with LLM providers strictly allow:
· Use of content for the training model
· Answering questions (considered “transformative work” when addressing derivative use)
· No display of book text
· No citations, to prevent content cannibalization
They are simply “providing a service to those who are interested and who want to work with us to supplement their own activities or, if they aren’t pursuing these opportunities directly … to still be able to benefit.” As Anna Leahy, director of Tabula Poetica, pointed out in thread, the potential upside here for open access journals like The Headlight Review is that LLM companies are already scraping the open internet and pillaging the work we publish anyway. At least this way, we can get some recompense: 15 cents for a 1500 word story. If Moby Dick were an open access text, it would earn $20.91 from this arrangement.
And this, I think, is the real rub. While EBSCO and Anthropic and Wiley and Open AI rake in tens of billions of dollars in corporate contracts, venture capital, and—most offensively—public library subscription fees, the creators and the laborers who produce the work they consume and capitalize earn fractions of a cent for their labors. Given EBSCO’s business model, prices are tough to come by, but in 2019, they offered Montana State a five year subscription to their database EBSCO eBooks for $57,810/year with a 2%/year renewal increase cap per year. By year five, Montana could have paid almost $300,000 (in state funds) to access EBSCO eBooks. How much of a cut did each author and publisher get? $0.0001 per word?
For Headlight to participate in the partnership program would have cost us another 50-75 hours of labor per issue in addition to whatever management it would take to secure author permissions and share the meagre spoils of licensing their work. Carry that across the 360 journals included in the “Literary Reference” database, and we’re already into the tens of thousands of hours of additional unpaid labor. And we haven’t even considered compensating the writers for the time it takes to produce the work in question.
Somewhere along the way, the founding principle of copyright, that the individual should maintain a monopoly on the fruits of their labor to sustain their endeavors, became perverted to serve corporate interests. The supposed beneficence of corporations like EBSCO serves to maintain the illusion that individual works of creativity, writing, scholarship, etc., have no value outside of the systems they’ve built; that artists only deserve compensation in the form of attention, recognition, and credibility; what’s valuable is the work of technicians and intermediaries who install the work in the network of extraction.
This bleak future promises to get darker now that those mechanisms are wedded to generative learning models, which threaten to cut out the writer all together. Whatever these databases are doing, it isn’t building a sustainable future for the literary arts, and that should give writers and publishers pause.
Fascinating column, Kurt. Had no idea EBSCO operated like this!
I always look forward to Kurt's columns!!