Comments on: The New Anthrosource

By: Our Circulatory System (or Folklore Studies Publishing in the Era of Open Access, Corporate Enclosure and the Transformation of Scholarly Societies) « Jason Baird Jackson

Fri, 28 May 2010 03:51:00 +0000

[...] Friedman 2009; Golub 2007a, 2007b, 2008a, 2008b; Jaschik 2007; Kelty 2007a, 2007b, 2008a, 2008b, 2009, [...]

By: Stumped by AnthroSource | Savage Minds

Stumped by AnthroSource | Savage Minds — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 13:51:50 +0000

[...] wrote to the AAA about this back in January, nearly a month after the new AnthroSource came out and made CKelty cry. I’ve been able to get around this problem in the past by doing a search for the article [...]

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By: Jason Jackson

Jason Jackson — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:37:13 +0000

One of the most articulate anthropologists in our community, one who knows a truly vast amount about the workings of the most technologically complex corners of our world, and of our discipline, has just indicated that he is ready to abandon engaging with the AAA. If he takes this path, he will be joining an exodus that was sadly already underway for reasons similar to those that Chris evokes. I find this dynamic, which really crystallized in my view several years ago in connection with earlier phases in the debate over AnthroSource, to be really disturbing. It is noteworthy to me in this instance that Chris’ comment is so unsurprising to his public here that nobody has even commented upon it.

In a forward looking mode, Chris (re-)prompts a potential discussion of the forms that anthropological networks and institutions may take in the years ahead. Fostering such a discussion was one purpose behind Kelty et al. (2008) ( https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/3167 )

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By: ckelty

ckelty — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 05:33:19 +0000

You know, most of these mistakes are ones that I would have made if I was running a scholarly society with several thousand members and a hundred years of publications to keep track of. It would be really hard to do this right.

The reason I can’t stop crying is that this isn’t being done by one person. It’s being done by a large “professional” organization that has *at least* 25 paid members (and this does not include the volunteer academics who “govern” the AAA). This year, I contributed some $400 to this organization, which boasts 11,000 members. Let’s be conservative and say only half of those members pay anything like what I do. That equals 2.2 million dollars a year. It’s not much, really, but it is about two million dollars a year more than it should cost to hire a professional or two who can do something simple like test whether links are broken.

Whatever is going on here, it involves a massive, inexcusable waste of money. So, I think I’m done giving money to the AAA. I would urge people for whom the AAA is truly an important entity to take note of these failures and continue to write and complain, and to point out that some academics just no longer see any reason to continue being a member. As for me, I think I need to pick my battles, and this may well be the end of my battles here.

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By: Richard

Richard — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 11:22:33 +0000

Links still not working from jstor or google scholar. It is incompetence beyond belief that these things were not thought through before the switchover. I don’t think this is a matter of a minor teething difficulty, it is a fundamental breakdown of the resource. As I am not American, I am not subject to the AAA as my professional body, I am just a (dissatisfied) customer consuming its products. However, if I was in America, this would raise serious questions about whether the AAA was fit for purpose.

These may sound like harsh words, but the time to work out these issues is BEFORE implementing a switchover, not afterwards – unless, of course, such a switchover was forced upon the AAA by the publisher without due notice (which raises a whole seperate questions about AAA and its publishing activities).

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By: Hugh Jarvis

Hugh Jarvis — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:41:43 +0000

Hi, gang. Just wanted to let you know that your colleagues who are involved in building AnthroSource are keen to hear your feedback.

As you know, AnthroSource is being transitioned onto an entirely new platform. The AAA Publications office, Wiley-Blackwell, and our CFPEP committee are all working hard to complete this enormous task, which only started last month.

As you have noticed by now, they’ve already addressed a number of these issues, and are aggressively resolving the rest — see Dion’s report here: http://tinyurl.com/89vzpd
or http://aaanet.org/publications/anthrosource/AnthroSource-Issues-and-Resolution-Timeframes.cfm

No, we don’t have all the answers, and this is new to all of us, so please try to be as constructive as possible, and do send your comments directly to us (best contact is Dion Dears at the AAA) so we can address them quickly!

The main place to watch for AS updates is in the publications area of the AAA web site, here: http://aaanet.org/publications/

Cheers,

Hugh Jarvis

(member of CFPEP = the Cmt on the Future of Print & Electronic Publishing)

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By: L.L. Wynn

L.L. Wynn — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:36:32 +0000

It looks like they’ve at least fixed the links problem. Yesterday I wasn’t able to access anthrosource from my uni library but I just went there now and found the links are working again. Don’t know if the search functionality has improved.

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By: Kerim

Kerim — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 03:07:36 +0000

It seems (based on my limited tests) that at least some of the linking problems from Anthrosource.net are now fixed. But Google is still broken and this bookmarklet seems to fix the google links. Thanks!

(You are right about how unprofessional the transition has been. They should have made sure everything worked first before making the new site live.)

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By: Derick Fay

Derick Fay — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 19:47:48 +0000

Ok…the bookmarklet now seems to work for about 85% of broken AS links. At

http://faculty.ucr.edu/~derickf/asfix/

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By: Derick Fay

Derick Fay — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 19:15:10 +0000

Oops…on further testing the bookmarklet doesn’t work consistently…can you hold off on posting that comment?

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By: Derick Fay

Derick Fay — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 19:09:52 +0000

Ok…rather than complaining I decided to write a quick javascript bookmarklet which will correct broken Anthrosource links. It’s here:

http://faculty.ucr.edu/~derickf/asfix/

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By: Derick Fay

Derick Fay — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:38:17 +0000

In addition, the full text search seems to be broken, only searching titles.

e.g. If I do an advanced search for

All of the words: johnson earle
…
Search for my words: anywhere in the article

I only get a single result – results URL is http://www.anthrosource.net/SearchResults.aspx?all=johnson%20earle&exact=&one=&occurrences=Anywhere&author=Last%20name%20only&publication=&start=&end=&sortby=Relevancy

and the result is an article with both johnson and earle in the title.

If I do an advanced search for these terms in full text in JSTOR, JSTOR finds 130 results; of these 33 are from issues of the American Anthropologist from 1997 onward, indicating that JSTOR is able to find results that Anthrosource should find but isn’t.

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By: Derick Fay

Derick Fay — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:31:07 +0000

I’m so glad to see this posted here as I’ve been in the midst of a series of frustrated e-mails back and forth with Wiley/AAA. I would urge others to write, cc’ing both the Wiley address and the AAA members address. Here’s an excerpt from the first part of my first e-mail which at least drew a very apologetic response:

1) All existing links are now broken. This means that google scholar results simply resolve to an error message indicating the page can’t be found. Thousands of users who might have found Anthrosource results via google scholar now receive error messages instead. This can hardly help the profile of our scholarship.

It’s also a problem for anyone who has saved URLs in citation management software (EndNote, BibDesk, etc.). One of my graduate students was midway through her comprehensive exams when the new site was launched, and discovered in the midst of preparing her essay that none of the links she had saved to Anthrosource articles worked any more.

It’s particularly frustrating that the DOI links don’t work (at least for any articles published prior to 2008). The aim of DOI (see http://www.doi.org/ ) was to create a persistent linking system that would continue to work even if the location of a resource changed. Even DOIs in refs. downloaded from the new Wiley site don’t work (e.g. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/aa.2004.106.1.17 ).

I can’t overstate how unprofessional this is. I worked in web design in the late 1990s and it was drilled into us (to the point where a colleague nearly lost their job for forgetting) that if you change a URL, you must always provide a redirect so that existing bookmarks will continue to work.

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By: Michael E. Smith

Michael E. Smith — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 03:43:49 +0000

Has anyone stepped back and asked how anthropology as a discipline is served by online reference sources compared to other disciplines? And following from that question, what can or should the AAA do to help? I tried to do some searching in the literature in geography and in history a while back, and neither field had anything like Anthropology Plus (a database I use all the time). But shouldn’t the AAA take some responsibility for assessing and promoting online resources in our discipline?

If one divides archaeology into anthropological vs. classical archaeology, the classicists are WAY AHEAD in online sources, data, applications, etc.

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By: Jason Jackson

Jason Jackson — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 20:48:08 +0000

Maybe an officer of the AAA will speak up here, but I think that this will not happen for reasons of policy. As an editor, I cannot really say much but I will note in response to Grad Student Guy that I have had a second row seat for these developments and that I have always asked a lot of questions and studied relevant documents as closely as I could. I am completely certain that individual benefits are not a matter of concern. (At least not in anything like the sense that you are contemplating.) For an easy source of information on the benefits to the AAA of the Wiley-Blackwell deal, one can consult a treasurer of a journal publishing section. After several years of stress, they were largely happy at the meetings this year because the sections are now making money rather than spending it on the production of their journals. There is a vast amount to discuss and debate about the future of scholarly communications in anthropology, but I do not think that AAA policy makers were being self-serving.

Beyond offering this thought, I am going to follow Chris’ lead and not talk about it.

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