Customary land tenure volume published open access

Now for a little self-promotion: I’m very proud to announce the publication of Customary Land Tenure In Australia and Papua New Guinea by the Australian National University Press, which includes a piece by me entitled “From Agency to Agents: Forging Landowners Identities in Porgera”. It is a great volume edited by Katie Glaskin and Jimmy Weiner — both prominent in Australian circles — and the contributors list is a who’s who of people who have been active in policy, anthropology, and activism surrounding customary land registration.

But best of all: the entire book available open access so you can “read it in its entirely online”:http://epress.anu.edu.au/customary_citation.html in either “PDF”:http://epress.anu.edu.au/apem/customary/pdf_instructions.html or “HTML”:http://epress.anu.edu.au/apem/customary/html/frames.php. For instance, you can “get my article here”:http://epress.anu.edu.au/apem/customary/pdf/ch05.pdf.

Working with Jimmy and Katie has been a good experience — this volume has gone through peer review from outside readers, is professionally copy-edited, and has high production values. It is available print-on-demand. The ANU press is, to a certain extent, neither fish not fowl as a press, and as such it demonstrates how open access is not an either-or proposition but enables a variety of different — and very flexible — publishing models.

Alex Golub is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He studies mining and petroleum development in Papua New Guinea, as well as American culture in to the online game World of Warcraft. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org