Eileen Joy, Our Fearless Open Access Leader at UCSB
Founder of Punctum Books, the only publisher of its kind in the entire world, Eileen Joy is the creative face of Open Access. Paired up with the University library, she’s the local hero of authors and readers alike that you probably haven’t yet heard of.
Ten years ago, the Open Access Movement was little more than a fringe movement advanced by a niche group of academic activists. However, in recent years, largely due to the legislative lead Europe has taken on the issue, it has quickly gained traction. Open Access works towards making publicly-funded research available to all, rather than stuck behind journal paywalls to which only enrollment or employment at a university can grant access. There are many reasons why this would constitute a major improvement for society, among them are scientific progress, ethical premises, and educational equity. But through her press, Punctum Books, Eileen Joy has given a whole new impetus to the Open Access Movement: creativity.
During our interview, she promised me, “It isn’t just like I’m a weirdo who wants more weird books. My question is: How does really novel, importantly new academic knowledge emerge in a system that’s trying to homogenize knowledge?” An academic to her core, most of her sentiments towards publishing and academia are presented in these kinds of theoretical inquisitions, and through them you can trace her lifelong civic momentum. Although she doesn’t deny being somewhat despondent about the ratio of people actually engaging in the betterment of our world, she describes her outlook as “epistemological realism combined with radical hope” ¾ simplified as “I see the world for what it is” but still “am working towards something.”
And selflessly work towards something is exactly what Joy has done. To create Punctum Books in 2011, she sold her house, resigned from a tenured professorship, and invested her entire retirement savings into the press. But founding Punctum on the grounds of becoming an Open Access revolutionary was more of an afterthought, as she was really interested in changing the kinds of books academics were allowed to publish, “a much more revolutionary thing in some ways.” As I probed deeper into the root of her passion for more varied publications in both content and style, she told me “I think life is very random, and it only makes sense when you look at it backwards. When I look backwards at my life, I can say, ‘Oh yeah, of course. Of course I’m a publisher now.’ I can see the dots that can be connected, but when you’re actually living your life, it isn’t like that at all.”
The first dot was plotted in Washington D.C., where she was born to an traditionally intellectual and historically involved family. Her maternal grandfather was a captain of the Limerick Corps of Irish Volunteers in the 1910–20s, a movement aimed at securing and maintaining “the rights and liberties common to the whole people of Ireland” (Ranelagh, 170). Joy’s father was also intensely involved in government service and civil rights, working for Robert Kennedy and marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, before settling into employment with the National Science Foundation for most of his life. Much of Joy’s passion comes from her father who was a frustrated artist stuck in the world of science and politics. He had a major impact on young Eileen’s literary creativity, frequently attending plays and surrounding her with books throughout her childhood home.
Even as a young adult, Joy was involved in publishing and editing. During her time at Virginia Commonwealth University, she was always involved in the campus literary magazine and student radio station. It was there that she earned her Bachelor of Arts in English, and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. Whether through essays, poetry, photography, fiction, or film she was always obsessed with creating, as well as “bringing people together and seeing what can be produced,” a quality that undoubtedly manifests itself at Punctum. Although she deeply enjoyed the creative outlet she was afforded in her master’s program, her PhD in literature as a medievalist was particularly underwhelming. She recounts of her time at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, “I couldn’t believe how lame it was. There was just no fire. I kept thinking ‘the reason people get a PhD is to become a professor, but all my professors don’t seem happy.’” As a result, she dropped out two years into the program, and from this another rather random dot was plotted in her lifepath.
In a turn of events that speaks to her renaissance-person nature, she became a landscape designer until her partner got a job in South Carolina. The move from Tennessee was far enough away that her accumulated gardening knowledge was no longer applicable in the Carolina environment. This led her to cold-call Francis Marion University and say, “Well…I almost finished a PhD, do you need anybody to teach?” She spent three years as an adjunct professor and completed her dissertation there in 2001, the final piece that had been absent from her PhD. It used medieval applications to better understand a terrorist group active in the 1990s. Ironically, on September 11, she called in sick to finish up its final few pages.
A paper Joy wrote stemming from her thesis marked the first time she personally encountered homogenization of thought within the world of academic publishing. Many medievalists are traditional historicists, essentially meaning “the past is the past and now is now.” Although she was trained as a medievalist, she wanted to use her creative writing skills in tandem. She said “I was part of a small group of scholars that was like, ‘This is ridiculous. History isn’t like that.’ It’s not like discreet event after another; everything’s connected. The past is still with us. So I decided that I was going to create the kind of scholarship where I would always take a medieval text, but I would think about it through the lens of a contemporary event.” When she wrote about the similarities between the contemporary occurrence of female suicide bombers in Chechnya and the Medieval poem, Beowulf, she was aiming to demystify the discussion surrounding the bombers into something that could be rooted historically and traced to a particular prerogative and identity, rather than women simply being “Islamified” or “brainwashed”, as popular media had been implying at the time. An undoubtedly unique and relevant perspective, the editor that reviewed the essay for publication conversely remarked, “This is an amazing essay. Take all the Chechnya stuff out and just leave in the Beowulf stuff and I’ll publish it.” This was a clear example of the very kind of gatekeeping of knowledge she despises to this day. In less of a position to say no at the time, she agreed to it, but later reinserted it in her own self-edited book.
Joy encountered a similar response in a piece correlating the war in Iraq and Afghanistan with an old English poem, when the editor once again said, “This is a really great article, but take out the stuff about Iraq and Afghanistan,” to which she replied, “No. I actually don’t want to.” The editor allowed her to leave it in for publication that time, but it was simply always like this for Joy and other academics wanting to branch out of the typical designated spheres of academia. At one point, a friend wrote a review about her Chechnya/Beowulf paper and, in Joy’s own words, prefaced it with, “This is an article about Beowulf and also Chechens, and the Chechens have nothing to do with medieval literature, so I’m going to take that part out of my review.” These were the first embryos of Punctum Books coming to life.
The leap from personal frustration to owning her own Open Access book publisher wasn’t immediate though. Before Joy sought a space for academic creativity within the Open Access Movement, she first created one within the existing system through her own journal published under Palgrave. The journal, called Postmedieval, was founded on the idea: “What are the questions that are really pressing down on us right now, that really worry us, and what can the past tell us about that?” She made it clear from the start that the journal would be aggressive in fostering the work of younger scholars, as well as deeply creative work. Since its creation in 2010, it has made good on its promise, and as a result of its shift from the old guard, has won three international awards. For one of which it beat out competing journals in cancer research for Best New Journal 2012. This was shocking due to how niche medieval studies really are, but attests to a rising universal desire to shake academic institutions and publications of their long-accumulated dust.
Not even a year after Postmedieval’s creation, she began making great sacrifices in order to found and fund Punctum Books in 2011. She lived in the homes of people who supported her vision and relied on her personal savings and retirement until 2015, when Punctum was finally able to pull in a minimal surplus income to make ends meet for Joy. Her tenure contract ended in 2013, when she officially resigned to focus on the press fulltime. When I asked where she mustered that kind of bravery, she assured me it was actually just foolishness, but I have a hard time believing that such a personal risk in the name of public progress could be anything less than real courage.
Many have had a hand in supporting the vision of Open Access with the wants and needs of authors in mind, but two stand out in particular. When Aranye Fradenburg, a medievalist colleague at the University of California, Santa Barbara, heard of her resignation, she called Joy and said “Why don’t you come here? You can live in my house rent-free, and we’ll see if we can figure out how to get UCSB to support what you’re doing.” Joy considers Fradenburg not only a benefactor of her work, but Punctum’s patron. Vincent van Gerven Oei, Punctum’s European co-director, also threw himself into the press full-force beginning in 2015. Joy was at a conference in Toronto when he asked her if he could get a drink with her. With little money at the time, he flew from Albania for that specific moment to propose working alongside Eileen on the press. She said “I can’t pay you anything,” and he said he didn’t care, despite having an undergraduate degree, two Master’s degrees, and two PhDs. He was hired, and remained unpaid until the beginning of 2018. She praises his dedication, stating, “We agreed about everything. He was just as passionate and driven as me. He believes in the mission, he believes in Open Access. He’s just as obsessive as I am, and a workaholic, which helps.”
Since coming to Santa Barbara in 2014, it wasn’t until last summer that the press truly became tied to the University, when K.A., a new head librarian from the California Institute of Technology, was employed in April. Joy knew of Antelman’s supportive position on Open Access and saw it as an opportunity to make a proposal: “I’m here anyway, working with faculty, working with students. You guys are trying to push everyone towards Open Access, so let’s work together. You can support my press, and I can help you support your mission.” With the help of UCSB, Punctum is now moving towards a unique business model that will come into full being in 2020. It relies on university library subscriptions that grant access to PDFs of Punctum’s entire book catalogue, similar to current corporate journal subscriptions but with books and at a fraction of the cost (Punctum asks universities to pledge between $1,500–3,000 annually, compared to a whopping $11.5 million for subscriptions with publishers such as Elsevier), as well as reader support. For this reason, Punctum is incredibly unique in that it is the only press in the entire world that relies on reader subscriptions, asking people to donate ten to twenty dollars a month and reasoning, “Don’t you think this is something worth contributing to?” And isn’t it? For the cost of a premium Spotify account, or two lattes a month, subscribers can gain access to hundreds of unique, informative books that, for the most part, they wouldn’t find anywhere else.
Although Joy is absolutely passionate about the Open Access Movement, she never fails to remind me that she really cares most about the editorial mission of the press. She quotes one of her favorite philosophers, Emmanuel Levinas, with his idea of la petite bonte or “the little act of goodness.” Eileen explains, “In the press, the goodness is in every author that finds a home for their work, which is weird and would otherwise get repressed; the author who goes to the traditional press and they respond, ‘Oh, you’re very smart, we like your work…do it like this for us,’ and the author goes back and changes their work…they kill their own soul a little bit because they need that credit on their resume. So if I can help that author create the work they want, and that work goes out into the world and has any effect on individuals who encounter it, then that’s good. I guess the thing is, it has to be good enough, total victory is not going to happen, although with Open Access it’s looking like maybe it will.”
For a full scope of Punctum’s inimitable catalogue and mission, visit their website at https://punctumbooks.com/.