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The arguments about value-added via networking leave me unconvinced because of an interesting feature of academic publishing: an inherent conflict of interest between authors and publishers. As an author, I welcome free distribution of my work because I gain no economic advantage from the status quo, nor do I bear any responsibility for overhead costs. So I say, give my stuff away for free! But the publisher must generate revenues to offset fixed costs. It’s a classic free-rider problem. Even if there is a moral dimension to this–and I don’t disagree with your assertion that organizations like the AAA are under a degree of moral pressure to make knowledge available as widely and inexpensively as possible (your scholarly ideal)–the AAA isn’t obliged to commit financial suicide. Your claim is that AAA’s current publishing model _is_ financial suicide. You may be right, but I’d like to know more about the financial terms of the alternative strategies.

Let me close my contribution to this thread by identifying what I take to be points of agreement between us:

–The current system of academic publishing is unsustainable even on its own terms. (This is far more true of professional journals published by the likes of Elsevier than it is of the AAA.) OA alternatives should be seriously considered if they can prove their viability.

–The AAA and similar organizations should make their publications available for the lowest price that is consistent with prudent management, however defined.

–Organizations like the AAA must learn how to inspire member loyalty and generate membership dues by emphasizing services other than journal publication. These include lobbying for us in Washington, providing accurate and timely information about policy issues of concern to the profession, providing a public forum for anthropologists to leverage our (limited!) political influence, and organizing national meetings.

Thanks for your contribution to public discussion of this issue, which is of great importance to everyone who toils in the groves of academe.

–mfb

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1. No one has ever argued that the AAA give away its content free to everyone and then money will magically appear in their coffers. This is a straw man argument. Can we please move past this misconception?

2. OA is not a business model, it is a scholarly ideal.

3. Today the OA community is experimenting with means to approximate this ideal as far as possible given the need to establish a publication program that is sustainable.

4. These include: electronic journals, print-on-demand, adding value to publications websites via social networking, tagging, personal libraries, etc.

5. The AAA\’s publication program is NOT running in the black. It is losing money. This problem is only going to get worse (why I think this requires a blog entry of its own).

6. The choice is NOT between a known-working charge-for-content model and a utopian and unworkable OA-inspired model. The choice is between an OA-inspired model which risks failure and a charge-for-content model which is a proven failure.

7. Incentivizing section membership is complex, as is the funding of AnthroSource, which draws on (some would say \’plunders\’) sectional budgets. Currently AnthroSource gives away ALL sectional journals to anyone with an AAA membership _regardless_ of their sectional affiliation(s). Clearly, this _disincentivizes_ sectional membership unless people REALLY value their paper copy of Nutritioanl Anthropology.

8. Membership in the AAA is incentivized by many things — mostly because of the way the AAA meetings monopolize the labor pool in anthropology. But also because the cost of joining is relatively low and paid for (for some) by their institutions.

The AAA has institutional and political ties with the companies that hired Dezenhall. The AAA also has a mindset in which revenues are generated by charging for content. Enforcing scarcity is a logical strategy given these assumptions. The result is that the AAA ignores OA-inspired opportunities to cut costs, generate revenue, and create a sustainable business model. How _is_ membership in the AAA and sections incentivized? Would redundant access _actually_ lead to a loss of subscriptions? We need to have a conversation about the new institutional economics of digital publishing. The AAA\’s unwillingness to have this conversation is _not_ the result of \”difficult funding realities of professional organizations\”. On the contrary, it is the result of the difficulties of getting our professional organization to face the difficulty reality of their new, digital sources of funding.

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I’m not in possession of the data, but I would guess that the AAA makes little if any money from journal subscriptions once they reckon with expenses. The real issue is that journal subscriptions or login rights are defined as a “benefit of membership.” As such, they are a powerful incentive to pay one’s annual dues. For many anthropologists, I’ll bet, subscription to journals may be the _primary_ motive for maintaining a membership.

Put another way, what are the odds that the AAA’s membership roster will grow once its journals are available to everyone for free? The Association is still burdened with most of the costs of producing the journals (which might be curtailed but by no means eliminated by abandoning paper editions), but its income is likely to decline. Sounds like a death spiral to me.

There are, of course, ways that this might be mitigated. The publishing division of the AAA could take a mass-market approach by offering open access for a much lower price–say, $25-30 a year–in the hope that subscribership would increase dramatically. (After all, isn’t it reasonable to think that access to all of those journals is worth as much as a harcover bestseller or 30 iPod downloads?)

In sum, I believe that the AAA case has less to do with Big Content, for which I have limited sympathy, than about the difficult funding realities of professional organizations.

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the current rituals of publication fit into the institutions that control academic hiring, promotion and tenure.

As for his other remarks–

But this [Internet] is still a largely unknown world to the people in their forties, fifties and sixties who have to make the decisions—and they, themselves, got where they are using the old system, so their own sense of self and self-esteem depends on “I did it, why can’t they?”

My, my. They were right. Don’t trust anyone under 30 [who do you think invented the Internet, networking, and cybernetics? Not the under 30s]

The remaining statement might have been new in 1974. But in 2007? Isn’t there a more relevant way to identify quality than shoving the 41 year old fogies out on the globally thinning ice, all the while blogged on MySpace, goobered, Digged, Technoratied, delectabled, p-cast, and fed?

Random flights of bytes are just that. Is Google ranking really so different from the Kula? (talk about self-reverential)

Open source doesn’t mean absence of peer review. Knowledge isn’t a limited good. On the other hand, the tenured establishment is. As long as there is envy of the status quo, the status quo will be jealously guarded. Who wants that?

Just as people must share seal meat and oil to maintain physical and social well-being, so, too, must they share knowledge–so that their minds will not rot.

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Under the current (old) regime, an author writes a paper and submits it to one journal (submitting to more than one simultaneously is a big NO-NO). The paper is peer-reviewed and, if chosen for publication, revised in response to the reviewers’ comments, then finally makes it into print. The journal in which it is published is ranked vis-a-vis other journals.

For hiring, promotion and tenure purposes, the content of the paper is now fundamentally irrelevant. It is now, in effect, a poker chip of a particular, known value. Decisions can be made by reviewing the stacks of chips that candidates can place on the table and quantitative criteria established for make-or-break points: “Great, your publications list now exceeds the minimum required for promotion” or “Sorry, kid, we see a lot of articles here, but since they are all in D-rated journals, they don’t amount to much.”

In a world where many of the people who have to make decisions are, in fact, clueless about what the people they are called upon to judge actually do (a perfectly natural consequence of academic specialization), this is a highly functional scheme. The peer-review, journal-ranking business provides the fig-leaf that people who should know what they are reading have in fact read this stuff and rated it highly enough to get into “good” journals.

Now ask yourself, what happens to this system in a world where people’s ideas fly randomly around the Internet and various versions of what they have written reside on servers all over the world. How do you count the value of what they have written?

The techies among us will say, quite rightly, that with online link-tracking and network analysis capabilities, the decision makers should be able to see at a glance how frequently so and so has been cited in online conversations other than those in which he or she takes part (a necessary condition to keep people from spamming up their own reputations). But this is still a largely unknown world to the people in their forties, fifties and sixties who have to make the decisions–and they, themselves, got where they are using the old system, so their own sense of self and self-esteem depends on “I did it, why can’t they?”

In a decade or two, the whole business of trying to treat knowledge as a collection of thingies, each of which can be exclusively owned and assigned a certain value, will probably seem as quaint as the Kula Ring to everyone except those who remember with fond nostalgia the valuables, a.k.a., intellectual poker chips, that they themselves accumulated. Until the generation that now holds the chips moves on….don’t hold your breath.

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In Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox: Wishlists, Gift Certificates, and Gift Giving in E-Commerce Summary: Although gift features leverage the online medium and draw new users to a site, they also introduce many usability pitfalls. Among them are poorly design…

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I don’t come from your world of peer review, but once your public becomes your peer review — or Amazon review — it’s up to your “big content” player, be they Nature or the mainstream media, to figure out how they can still add value.

Good stuff — interesting blog! Thanks –

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The publishing program has made a number of important steps forward—the search feature of AnthroSource now works, and the AAA offers reduced pricing for ‘third world’ and ‘tribal’ institutions (but not third world individuals or people or others who have not officially met the AAA’s definition of ‘charity case’).

I was about to send them a protest about this very thing, but you have more clout. I’m the indigent scientist for the Unorganized Borough in Alaska. Actually, I’m the only registered scientist. I’m in the charity case bin because the Anthropology professions have not (with the partial exception of the Canadian Assoc of Physical Anthropologists) made any official effort to clarify that some A-word transcripts are actually natural sciences and therefore qualify for state or federal employment (and re-employment, too.)

To be fair, even the WHO, BMJ, and other portals available to the genuine third-world don’t apply to US Minor Outlying Islands (http://ykalaska.wordpress.com) This makes it very difficult to support people whose only hospital and college library don’t offer access to journals, even to those with big bucks for memberships.

At least the other portals understand some of the outside world difficulties of “grassroots science”. The AAA during the past 25-30 years has always struck me as increasingly self-reverential, (from 4 fields to 1) much to the loss of all the rest of us.

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