Comments on: Anthropology News: Special “Safety Valve” Edition

By: Kate G.

Kate G. — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 19:57:11 +0000

Thanks for discussing this, Rex. Two points come to (my) mind and here’s one.
As I keep on ranting to colleagues, AnthroSource is absolutely the most fantastic thing that the AAA has done for independent scholars and practitioners ever (although since Noel Chrisman is the Executive Program Chair for the 2008 AAA meetings, maybe AnthroSource will come in second for practitioners). The fact is that independent scholars and practitioners have rarely had access to academic libraries and we have thus been cut off from the key discussions and developments in our fields unless we forked out a lot of money to join every section we could possibly have an interest in so as to receive their journal/newsletter. I have been delighted with AnthroSource.
This has also been important for people who work at vastly underfunded small, urban universities whose libraries cannot afford the costs of AAA. I am currently teaching at such a university. They carry NO anthropology journals. In fact, I’m the only teaching anthropologist and I’m an adjunct!
As a result, I was very pleased to be able to go to AnthroSource whenever I wanted to look things up quickly for a lecture or to answer student questions. (Yeah, I don’t know everything … yet.)
But the reconfiguration of the AAA web site has had a side effect. I can’t access AnthroSource _under my own login id and password_ at this university. Instead, I get a page that tells me to get my university to BUY AnthroSource.
OK – we’ve had an entire winter with no hot water in my building because a pipe leading into the building broke; leaking roofs, in my case from the 6th floor all the way to my 3rd floor classroom — I had to ask my overcrowded classroom to simply not sit under the leak; buildings closed for asbestos removal that should have been done 2 decades ago; and no ability to use smart classroom technology because we cannot afford to replace things like the projector lamps.
Buy AnthroSource? Could we put things into perspective here? I’ve paid for it, let me access it myself when and where I need to. I promise that if this university ever allocates money for a full-time/long-term anthropology position and if I am hired for that position, I will do my best to get the library to buy anthropology literature. For now, I’m happy to be evangelizing the perspective of anthropology to a new population.
/Rant over/

By: lmichael

lmichael — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 16:06:49 +0000

Ah, my html tags didn’t work (what up with that, btw?). Here are the links:

http://elanguage.net/about.php

http://www.lsadc.org/info/pubs-elang-agora.cfm

By: lmichael

lmichael — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 16:04:14 +0000

Rex,

Since in your post you emphasize the need to think about concrete steps that can be taken by anthropologists at this point with respect to OA and AAA’s journals, I wanted to point you to the eLanguage platform (here) organized and supported by the Linguistic Society of America, as a possible model for at least some ways to move forward. The basic idea is that LSA has set up infrastructure, using the Open Journals management system (see also here for some description of the infrastructure), to enable the creation of a set of peer-review OA “co-journals” that run parallel to Language, the LSA’s main publication. The new journals are just starting out, and several ones are in the proposal stage, but it’s really looking like LSA is going to make OA a central part of the publishing model it oversees.

In any event, I thought you, and other people here at SM, might find the eLanguage platform useful to “think with”.

By: Rex

Rex — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:18:42 +0000

Will –

Crushing subscription fees are a major motivation for OA advocates to try to change the system. These fees (in general) are high because of concentration in the publishing industry which gives big publishers unreasonable power and lets them charge what they like, not because producing scholarly journals is incredibly expensive (although, to be sure, it is certainly not free). All business models — include reader pays — face challenges. But this just means we will have to think intelligently about alternatives.

As for the relationship between the prestige of journals, open access, and tenure, these are also important issues. Personally I doubt that we need tenure committees to recognize the prestige of OA journals for the movement to move forward. If anything, the reverse will happen — a few cohort of assistant professors will come of age with a strong sense of the potential open access, but have to publish in closed journals until, slowly, they begin accumulating on powerful committees in their department…

A key transitional step here is recognizing that OA is a scholarly _ideal_, not a class of journals. American Anthropologist is, in some senses, an ‘OA’ journal in that authors can self-archive their post-prints of articles from that journal (thanks to the far-sighted work of the now-defunct AnthroSource Steering Committee). Sage publications allow opening up your pre-print and, after a 1 year embargo, your post-print as well. We need to preserve these victories and encourage further openness — if American Anthropologist suddently starts loosing credibility as a result you can call say “I told you so” a few years from now…. :)

By: Will

Will — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 13:47:29 +0000

Rex–

Thanks for highlighting these articles and the issues they raise. Two points on which the authors have remained largely silent, perhaps because they are of more concern to academics (strictly) than to AAA, but which nonetheless have significant impact on the possibilities of Open Access initiatives.

One, to suggest that the alternate model is “reader pays” neglects the enormous burden on the institution’s budget in the form of library subscriptions. Here’s a short and selective list of subscription costs this past year for the University of North Carolina’s library:

AnthroSource : $1000
American Anthropologist: $430
Anthropology News: $100
American Ethnologist: $340
Cultural Anthropology: $110
Ethos: $80

The second issue, closely related to these costs in academic circles, and perhaps implied in the discussions of peer review but never overtly addressed, is the relationship between publication in these journals and tenure. Unless open access journals are given the same status in tenure decisions as those published by WileyBlackwell (and Elsevier and University presses), the movement is stillborn.

By: Zé

Zé — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 10:40:26 +0000

People seems to forget that the individuals, that is, the writers, the researchers, are the ones who make, through history, a good, important, and famous journal.

If the intellectuals choose to publish articles in free and open access journals, denying the possibility of publishing in paid publications, I bet that the reality will change and the paid publishing companies will think about the future.

Science should be free. Science and the publication of investigation, is too way institutionalize, people should make more often their own path, rejecting maintenance of reality just because it was always like that.

Anthropology nowadays is a mess and a disappointment. Look at us, the biggest problem we’re discussing in our present times, is the anthropologists in war zones, and the theme of open access. It is such a ridiculous era to be an investigator and student. Long live the classic anthropology, cause the present and the future, is totally ridiculous comparing to the past.