Should the AAA stop printing paper journals?
A couple of months back I wrote “a post”:http://savageminds.org/2006/01/13/is-digital-publishing-bad-business-for-the-aaa/ which examined the tensions between AnthroSource and the sections of the American Anthropological Association. The sections restrict content in order to force subscription — the only way you get to read their sectional journal is to join the section. But now AnthroSource provides an electronic copy of all sectional journals online for anyone who is a member of the AAA (and AAA, of course, restricts content in order to force subscription — you don’t get access to AnthroSource unless you’re a member of the AAA. It’s all very meta). But note the principle that section members assume their members are acting on: given the choice between paying US$75 for a paper version and section membership versus paying just for AAA membership and a login to AAA, most people will take the cheaper digital texts. Given the fact that the sections believe (or fear!) that section members prefer cheap digital content to expensive analog content, we might want to ask the question:
Should the AAA actually be printing paper versions of its journals at all?
I imagine that most readers will consider this question shocking — the idea of the AAA disbanding its paper publications seem unthinkable. And yet is this because of a deep commitment to paper or simply because this idea is new and therefore a little unsettling? Just how convinced are you that paper journals ought to stick around in a world where digital texts make it redundant? Let me put it another way — if you are convinced that paper has got to stay, how much are willing to pay for it? US$75? US$45? US$10? In my experience, when people are initially confronted with the idea of giving up paper, they balk. But when asked how much they’re personally willing to pay to support it the picture changes quite a bit. Personally, I myself _do_ want the AAA to keep printing paper journals — I like browsing through paper. But like most I place the value of a paper subscription _much_ cheaper than what I’m currently paying to the AAA.
Asking this question about journals let’s us ask a wider, more important question: why do people join the AAA at all? I’ve often heard AAA muckitymucks speak as if the journals were the main reason that people join, but I’m not sure that’s the case. I suspect that people join for different reasons in the course of their career and depending on what sort of anthropologist they are. But my feeling is that the number one benefit of AAA membership is attending the AAA. We love it, we hate it, but the AAA meetings are where the social life of the discipline happen. If you want to give a paper, you give it at AAA. If you want to hire someone, you do it at AAA. If you want to get hired by someone you do it at the AAA.
I can imagine other reasons that people join the AAA other than the journals and attending the AAA. Some sections, such as Central States and AES have their own conferences that people enjoy attending. And of course many people join because it is the right thing to do. But overall my impression is that the biggest incentive to join the AAA is to become part of its social life at the AAAs. Whether you consider this to be a carrot or a stick depends, of course. I sometimes get the feeling at AAAs that many people are resulctant to put down the money for the AAA but that they had to in order to go to give a paper or participate in a job search. Of course its not surprising that anthropologists have a certain ambivalence to all this refelexivity and the fact that the meetings look like a bad remake of the inner sections of _Elementary Forms of the Religious Life_, but thinking about all this makes me, at least, think about ‘member benefits’ in a way that is larger than journals.
I don’t know. What do you think? Why do you join the AAA? And how much would you pay for paper?
Rex, you raise a good question. Before I ramble on, just for the record, let me say that I joined AAA in graduate school and have maintained the membership ever since for mainly sentimental reasons.
In my own case, the problem with the paper journals is not the cost–it’s the bulk. In the best of all possible worlds I would be able not only to subscribe to several section journals but also have the time to read them before their rising piles begin to overwhelm the limited space in my Japanese-sized home and office and I find myself throwing them out before I’ve even looked at them.
What I would really like is the equivalent for anthropology of Arts & Letters Daily or Google News. In other words a place where I could instantly discover what articles people are talking about, read the articles, and be able to burrow down and find what else the authors have written.
If properly designed the space wouldn’t simply be an electronic attic in which to paw through the jumble. It would be constantly alerting me to where the action is in the field and how it might be changing.
That’s my dream solution.
My primary concern with going completely electronic is archival. A book has the fortunate ability to be read without the use of technology, while pdfs, robust as they are today, will eventually need to be upgraded, and will always use some sort of technology to be accessed. Plus, at least in my university library, you need an account to access the online materials, whereas any geek can wander the shelves to find back copies of the AmerAnth or whatever your personal poison is.
I personally am very fond of electronic forms of publication (I only have so many filing cabinets and bookshelves, after all), in fact I love that you can buy individual copies of articles that you find of interest in so many different journals. But I would protest loudly if archival quality paper documents were not stored in multiple places around the world.
Kris
I’ve been working hard for several years to eliminate as much paper as I can in my own life. I find it frustrating that the AAA insists on sending me paper copies of things and I wish there was some way to opt-out.
Regarding PDFs, I’m curious: I think future compatibility won’t be a problem for technological reasons. There should never be any reason to break backward compability with older PDF formats. However, there may be legal reasons to worry, as it is a proprietary file format owned by Adobe. At the same time, however, PDF is an open standard, so I’m wondering where that leaves us legally? Perhaps better informed readers can clear this up?
There is an interesting article here about how the government of Mass. decided to use OpenDOcument instead of a microsoft format.
I wonder, responding to Kris, if the answer might not be to invert the current process in which articles and books first published on paper are made available electronically. Why not start with electronic publication, track readership, and only publish on paper those which clear a certain threshold of readership/citation, to ensure that they remain part of the historical record, even in a Canticle for Leibowitz post-catastrophe situation….
Too many dead trees going into deadly, uninformative dreck, IMHO….
Seems to me that a robust electronic archiving system, with optical and magnetic backups routinely and widely distributed, is at least as strong an archival system as mouldering paper in financially squeezed libraries. John’s solution — running off paper when a certain threshhold is reached — doesn’t really address the issue; the things that need saving are not necessarily the things that are popular now, or even in the lifetime of the journal. Electronic archiving means never having to make those choices, though — memory is cheap. All of AnthroSource could be stored on an HD-DVD or two, in multiple formats, and distributed throughout the world in preparation for the Liebowitzian Holocaust. That electronic archives need technology to maintain and use is true — but paper is not tech-free (ask an archival librarian!). Paper requires resources for preservation, storage, and cataloguing — resources whose availability has been strained at the best of times and is subject to every political and economic shift in the wind. I suppose we could count on the same luck that’s preserved the Dead Sea Scrolls (which are so much easier to reconstruct than pdf’s on HD-DVD?) but in most cases where paper has survived it’s because someone — medieval monks, Abbassid Muslims, Chinese mandarins — has seen fit to allocate resources for the storag and preservation of the material. Which means that, along the way, choices were made as to what was and was not worthy — where are the papers of Aristotle’s friend Bubbastotle, the philosophical clown?
I think ending paper publication is an extreme position, and a very unlikely one. If anything the “paperless office” revolution always creates more demand for paper. Read The Social Life of Information, which explains in part why paper continues to have uses that can’t be captured by electronic documents. That said, limiting the paper copy to libraries, bookstores and those willing to pay a premium for it, or using a print-on-demand service that allows people to get a paper copy if they want it (or for that matter a bound collection of articles from ten different journals over the years organized by my own criteria and sequentially numbered as an edited volume suitable for assigning to a class) sounds like a fantastic idea whose time is most definitely here. I may not pat $10 for the next issue of AA, but I might pay $20 for the one that has my article in it (I want archival copies too!). Similarly, I just paid apple $90 for a 60 page book of i-photos that i took. I’d pay $60 (and make my students pay it too) for a nicely bound and printed (on archival paper and good ink) book of articles for my Fieldwork Methods class if I could make it myself. Oh, and PDFs are fine until the next thing comes along. Nothing is future-proof. Books still win that contest by something like 400 years.
Slightly off the track, but does anyone but me remember the famous science fiction story (Asimov? Frederic Brown?) about the process that leads to creation of histories (to a large exponential number) of bibliographies (a larger exponential number) of data stored on chipped quanta in a black hole about the size of a basketball….and, then, …….
the librarian forgets the password.
Well, let me preface this by saying that the minute I got a tt job and moved to Canada I pretty much flung my AAA membership out the nearest window with a happy cackle and with no plans ever to retrieve it — my institution subscribes to AnthroSource, and I resented the hell out of the indiscriminately high fees charged by the AAA to post-grad members: fees that are painless to full time faculty at most institutions b/c they can be put on their professional expense accounts, but are a giant bite out of the meager incomes of recent PhDs who are on the job market and can’t not join the AAA if they want to look at job ads, go the meetings, etc. etc. All of that being said, I do know there is one huge drawback to no longer receiving paper journals: I have no motivation, given time constraints/a personal tendency to slothfulness, to read outside my interest areas. The great thing about electronic resources is their targetability. The great thing about a paper journal is that since it’s right there, you’re more likely to page through an article about physical anthropology, or religious revival in Tanzania, or what-have-you that otherwise you’d never look at. That, actually, is the one thing that has made me re-think the wisdom of giving the back of my hand to the AAA membership format forever (I haven’t done anything about it to date, however).
While, in some past life full of paper, I have discovered many great things by browsing paper resources, I find that there are many equivalent forms of electronic browsing which lead me to just as much discovery – if not more. Not just Amazon’s “people who bought this also bought…” but comments from people on blogs who say “you have to read this too!” … not to mention tagged media like del.icio.us and citeulike, etc. Musicians mourn the death of the album (who reads liner notes anymore – the iPod is information deprived it makes one want to cry), but simultaneously celebrate new forms that have emerged (remixing culture and music blogs, etc.) Paper will never go away, but we certainly don’t need as much of it as we once did. Why should I have to get a print subscription to certain weekly journals to get online access as well? I suppose they need the circulation numbers?
I think the fetish for paper may go away with some new technologies around the corner – screens as thin as paper as bright as your TV which can be rolled up and put away like a window shade. Electronic ink? Imagine a book that can be any book you want it to be – or a 10 page book that can hold an infinte number of pages. It was easy for CDs and then iPods to kill LPs because we only read the Album cover – not the contents. Books are harder, but I can’t help but feel that the book killing technology is just around the corner. I’m not saying that something won’t be lost in the process – just that I think the biggest hurdle to killing paper has been the fact that we currently need to either (a) print something out anyway, or (b) look at it on a large, heavy, and not very portable monitor; but new organic displays which can literally be printed onto a surface will change all that. It may still take some time, but I’ve been following this technology for some time and I know there are a lot of people working very hard to bring it to market as fast as possible.
Interesting points. People have archival concerns, but of course you can always print out archival copies, and projects like Portico are developing archival technology for electornic documents.
Then we have an interesting contrast — Kelty likes the idea of print-on-demand because it allows him to get just the articles he wants, while Ozma is worried that getting a ‘daily me’ digest of articles prevents her from hearing other news.
I guess the question I really wanted to ask was what else besides journals do people value about AAA membership? So far we’ve seen sentimental value and job search, and (in a way), Kelty’s proposal for a print-as-you-like approach.
I’ll admit, I like conferences. I could do without the expense, but that aside, I enjoy the experience of a) catching up with people at other institutions I rarely see, b) getting in on the newest material in and out of my field, and c) sometimes connecting with new people I’d not have met otherwise. Granted, you don’t have to be a member to go to the conferences, but you do have to if you want to present or organize anything there, so that’s one reason I value my membership.
I’ll also admit that I like conferences, meeting people I’ve only known on line face-to-face, meeting others in sessions, hallways, the bar, at lunch or dinner. The real thing is a lot more fun than virtual encounters.
Still, I note that Democrats Abroad has been experimenting with live video streaming and VLOGing as a way to expand participation in our international meetings, which have heretofore been restricted to those able to afford international travel. I envision a day when an online program for the AAA (or other meetings) will let you click on sessions to see them live or recorded. I can see the recorded versions being especially attractive, not only for those of us with time zone issues, but also for those who have experienced having to choose between two or more interesting sessions scheduled at the same hour.
I personally would like to see the AAA hosting more smaller regional and topical conferences and depending less on the large annual meeting. I think I get more both intellectually and social-netowrking-wise out of such smaller venues.
Kerim has a nice idea. It strikes me, however, that as long as universities are footing travel costs for participants and the big AAA meeting retains its role as the one-stop shopping place for job interviews, the likelihood of its realization is low.
I could be wrong, but, but impressionistically, based on my own now ancient history, interviewers are typically people with specialties different from the interviewee–if they are looking for, say, an Oceanist specializing in Papua New Guinea, they are doing so because their department feels a lack in this area. Sending non-Oceanists to the Oceanists’ meeting would be inefficient. No problem, perhaps, if this were an era where schools had lots of money to play with, but….
i think that electronic publishing should be a complement as well as an aid to paper publishing, not a replacement for it. Simultaneously publishing a paper journal and making it available on the Web makes the content much more readily and cheaply available, but having only an electronic version makes it doubtful whether the content will survive for very long. paper has been tried and tested as a durable medium for human communications; the archival standards for alkaline and acid-free papers are a step in the right direction.
electronic media are great for copying and dissemination, but for archiving they pose problems of their own, primarily the durability of storage media, and the obsolescence of software designed to read them. hardware manufacturers generally expect their products to be superseded within a few years, so permanence of their storage media is not a big concern for them, because they expect people to adopt the new and better models when they’re put on the market (how else would they make money?). software makers, on the other hand, could go bust or discontinue their product lines. the written word, on the other hand, depends solely on the continuity of language and the human sense of sight, both of which have better track records than say, atari or BASIC.
digital journals can only be archived if they are migrated from time to time to new software and hardware platforms as and when the old formats become obsolete. this is fine for as long as libraries and archives exist and are funded, but this is not something we should be complacent about. and it’s not just alexandria we’re talking about. political unrest has destroyed libraries in the former Yugoslavia (notably in Sarajevo) and museums in Iraq. even so, it is comparatively more difficult to smash stone inscriptions and burn books (books are actually pretty hard to burn, and much text may remain intact because they can survive with only the margins singed) than it is to wipe a hard drive clean or have it in good condition but unreadable because of technological obsolescence.
i’m not against electronic publishing. without free online journals, blogs, websites, and newspapers i would be very information poor, especially since i have no institutional affiliation to leach subscriptions off (i’m presently waiting to enrol in college). please support making content available online, because freer information makes for a more vibrant community and a living community is the key to keeping knowledge in use and growing rather than buried and dead, but don’t forget that posterity deserves to know what we’re talking about and the mistakes we’ve made and lessons we’ve learned.