Who Owns this Journal?

Until fairly recently, the question of ownership has not been a particularly salient issue for us. Kairos is independently owned and operated; for fiscal and legal considerations, it's owned by Doug, but our understanding of our mission and purpose means that it is really owned collectively by all of the volunteers who serve as the staff and editorial board, and more broadly speaking, owned by the field it serves. As far as we can tell, that's an uncommon ownership model (although there are other journals, particularly in the field of writing studies, that operate on a similar model). The publishing of academic journals, however, is a very large enterprise (in terms of the number of for-profit and non-profit journals, considered across all academic disciplines). The for-profit journal publishers constitute an industry, whereas the nonprofit and independent journals are a service to their individual fields. I think this distinction is important, especially when questions of ownership get entangled when a journal is caught in a shift between the two positions.

In August of 2026, the National Council of the Teachers of English decided to dissolve one of its constituents, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). CCCC's members are (were, now that it's gone) teachers and scholars of writing instruction at the college level and researchers and theorists who focus on writing studies, broadly writ. CCCC has been around a very long time, and both Cheryl and Doug have attended the conference over the years of our careers in academia. CCCC isn't just a conference though, it also supports a journal (College Composition and Communication, CCC) and a book series (Studies in Writing and Rhetoric), as well as offering grants and awards. As NCTE abandons its commitments to the members of CCCC, one question is what happens to the journal? NCTE has opted to move toward a position within the industry of academic support, seeing the financial rewards related to pushing "AI" and other ed-tech into k–12 writing instruction, which is a position opposed by CCCC. It no longer serves students, scholars, or teachers and instead serves its own financial and political interests—it's not a service to any field at this point. So does CCC (the journal) become a revenue generator for the industry, or will it remain a service to the field? It seems that NCTE doesn't see any value in supporting writing studies or writing instruction in higher education, and will allow the editors and staff of the journal to take it to a new home, to a new owner (although whether a university press or a nonprofit like the WAC Clearinghouse will serve as that new home isn't yet settled).

The question of ownership also impacts the degree of agency that editors can exert on their publications: corporately-owned journals are beholden to shareholders and market forces, and decisions about publishing issues, ranging from control of editorial policies to pressure to forward or censor particular research can lead to disagreements—Retraction Watch currently lists 57 cases (from 2016–2026) of journal editors resigning en masse in response to corporate meddling. These resignations sometimes are a response to the firing or non-renewal of a good chief editor, but also have been spurred by companies charging ever higher article processing fees (APCs) to authors, reducing editorial support, like copyediting, switching to AI-based processes, or pushing for increases in publications (which puts pressure on peer review and can lead to the publication of lower-quality work). 

Nonprofit ownership seems like it would be a good way to mitigate the market pressures and lack of integrity of corporate ownership, but the leadership of the nonprofit, if not designed solely to support a specific journal, can also come into conflict with the aims of the editors and the mission of the journal (as our example with NCTE demonstrates). Many journals are published by institutions—usually universities, and often located in university presses (which are market-driven) and/or supported by libraries (which are service-driven). This may be the best ownership model in terms of working relationships, but from a sustainability model, these journals can also lose support as higher education and its institutions continue to be defunded financially and attacked politically. 

Since there is no best model of ownership, anyone starting a new journal should seek support from whichever approach best fits their mission, and should be sure to develop strong contracts and MOUs with any corporation, nonprofit, or education institution they work with.

The question of journal ownership, of course, also impacts the question of who owns the published work. For most journals, authors sign over the copyright interests in their work at the time of publication, which leaves limited opportunities to control the work once those rights are surrendered (but see our post on Ethically Circumventing Paywalled Publishing Practices for ways to wrest back some of that control). Journals can choose to allow authors to retain some or all of their copyright interests, which is an important consideration for both authors and publishers.

Who owns Kairos webtexts?

Webtexts (Kairos’s version of articles) are owned by their authors, and that has always been the case. The current copyright policy reads, in part: 

We encourage authors to place a Creative Commons license on their work, which allows authors to declare what rights (if any) they are willing to grant to others to make use of their work. If no CC license is declared on the work, then the author(s) retain traditional copyright to their work except for the rights granted to the journal to publish and archive as listed in the licensing agreement elsewhere in these guidelines.

In addition, the Kairos interface is licensed with a CC-BY license, which states that “anyone is free to copy, distribute, display, or perform the infrastructure and main user interface of Kairos under the condition that you give the original author(s) credit.” The editorial team’s approach to copyright and article ownership has been this way for as long as we can remember and was institutionalized for decades through the journal’s cheekily named copyleft.html policy page (see the history of copyleft as a term). The earliest version of Kairos’s copyright policy we can find is from 2006 in the Wayback Machine, a full decade after the journal’s founding in 1996. (By comparison, Creative Commons didn’t issue its first license until 2002.) The 2006 version of the copyright policy reads similarly to Kairos’s current version, although a recent change—due to eligibility criteria for entry into the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)—the copyright policy and licensing/permissions policy, which used to be a single policy statement, were separated in two. The current licensing/permissions policy contains clear language regarding usage of copyrighted (including Creative Commons-licensed) webtexts: 

Authors of accepted webtexts assign to Kairos the right to publish and distribute their work electronically, including publication on the web or any other media, and to archive and make it permanently retrievable electronically. Authors retain their copyright interest in their work, however, so after their project has appeared in Kairos, they may republish their text in any manner they wish—electronic or print—as long as they clearly acknowledge Kairos as its original site of publication.

If you have media inquiries regarding the licensing and republication of Kairos webtexts, please contact the publisher regarding the journal and its design and the webtext author regarding individual webtexts. Permission to use screenshots of the webtexts we publish must be requested from both the journal (for the interface) and the individual author (for that author's work).

The Kairos editors have tried to make it as clear as possible who owns what work, what the licenses are, and how to request permission to use materials therein. 

The ongoing crisis in our field, precipitated by NCTE's cavalier disposal of an entire field's infrastructure, prompted us to think about these questions of ownership as an important consideration for journal editors and publishers. And it makes us thankful that when NCTE asked Kairos back in the late 90s if it would join as of their journals, the editors fortuitously said (as they were familiar with their prior failed attempts of NCTE to develop their own digital version of CCC) absolutely not.

(For more on that story, see our chapter "History of a Broken Thing: The Multi-Journal Special Issue on Electronic Publication" in Microhistories of Composition, Bruce McComiskey, USU Press).