The time is gone when anthropologists could find solace in the claim that our main civic duty–and the justification for our public support–was the constant reaffirmation that the Bongobongo are “humans just like us.” Every single term of that phrase is now publicly contested terrain, caught between the politics of identity and the turbulence of global flows. Too many of the Bongobongo are now living next door, and a few of them may even be anthropologists presenting their own vision of their home societies, or studying their North Atlantic neighbors. The North Atlantic natives who reject them do so with a passion. Those who do accept them do not need anthropologists in the welcoming committee.
–Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations (2003:137)

Trouillot is then outlining a vision of anthropological duties and risks, include making native voices more full interlocutors, identifying the ultimate targets of anthropological discourse, and publicizing the stakes of anthropological exchange.

To what degree do Open Access efforts–specifically Hau–move us in that direction?

Allow me to first state that I am very encouraged by Hau and its potential. I also do not want to take away from the many interesting comments. However, from that discussion, I am left wondering:

1. As Rex identified in his initial post, “I don’t see a role for indigenous anthropology (i.e. by and for indigenous anthropologists) in this program at all.” David Graeber challenged this, but Rex challenged back–and so it seems the question is still on the table: To what degree might open access also be a place where indigenous anthropologists, native voices, and internal others have a chance to become more full interlocutors in anthropological conversations?

2. Are we “identifying clearly the ultimate listeners,” those Trouillot called “the Sepulvedas of our times” (2003:136)? Hau admirably aims to make “anthropology itself relevant again far beyond its own borders” (2011:viii) and is specifically launched against insularity and triviality. At the same time, the observation of “parochial irrelevance” is followed by lamenting that the Deleuzians, Speculative Realists, Lacanians, and Foucauldians are not taking classic anthropology into account, “a colossal failure of nerve” (2011:x). But are these the Sepulvedas of our times?

3. Trouillot was not talking about Open Access, but he did discuss accessibility: “Media claims notwithstanding, the influence of academic research that could be labeled politically ‘progressive’ has decreased–if only because these works are increasingly inaccessible to lay readers” (2003:137). And so I here wonder–even if every article in American Anthropologist were declared Open Access today–to what degree would it make a difference for the Bongobongo and the Sepulvedas of our times? I do not mean to be too harsh–Trouillot recognized the need for “a technical vocabulary to which research contributes and without which it cannot be sustained” (2003:137, and of course Trouillot’s Global Transformations is rather out-of-reach for many lay readers)–but it is worth thinking about how Open Acess and accessibility could and should interact.

This also seems related to Rex’s analogy to Academia as Music Industry. “Platinum hits” may be rarer, but the irrepentant Sepulvedas of our times keep churning out multi-nationally financed blockbusters.

But what happens when mp3 proliferate, multiple indie labels spring up, and the center falls out of genres like, for instance, hip hop, as they fragment into multiple different audiences and communities? Revenues drop, for one thing, and the publishing industry attempts to litigate or legislate away the new-found freedom that these communities have, attempting to make sharing illegal so that they can continue to profit from the scarcity they are architecting into what was formerly an open system.

For music listeners, rather than publishers, an issue of ‘importance’ arises — how can you tell that the assistant musician in your department is ‘important’ and deserves tenure in an era when platinum hits are getting rarer and rarer? What counts as importance is itself shifting. I can see a number of ways out of this dilemma but whatever route departments chose will require a choice. And standing up and deciding for yourself how to handle something as important as the professional credentialing of the professoriate is a big challenge which requires a lot of confidence in one’s own academic judgement. Which means, of course, that it is the sort of decision that the vast majority of us will hope is made by someone else! But at the end of the day, that is the sort of decision will have to be made.

A quick look at the bios of the contributors and editors to HAU will reveal that it is in many ways a Chicago-Oxbridge production, but with a continental twist. In many ways, HAU represents what people at some of the most prestigious institutions of anthropology have been thinking for some time, but the journal ‘opens up’ that thought to the public by making their work open access. The result is something unique: a journal with a strong, almost parochial character which is also transparent to a fault.

As someone in this network (but not really involved in the production of HAU) I recognize this take on ‘ethnographic theory’ as a species of what they call in France the ‘sciences humaines’: an approach to knowing the human that is rigorous, humanistic, and often places anthropology in conversation with philosophy rather than, say, evolutionary biology. At least this is how it seems to me.

What Ethnographic Theory Is, afaik

So what is ethnographic theory? According to da Col and Graeber “a conversion of stranger-concepts [that entails]… the destruction of any firm sense of place that can only be resolved by the imaginative forumulation of novel worldviews” (vii-viii).

The goal of anthropology on this account (afaik) is to take alien concepts, understand them, and then see the way they sort of make sense from our point of view, but don’t quite. Another kind of anthropology might try to slot alien concepts into a broader conceptual system, to say “this is a variety of exchange” or “this is a kind of taboo”. Ethnographic theory, on the other hand, wants to resist this easy assimilation. It wants to find the part of a concept which is untranslatable and use it as a jumping-off point for our own theoretical innovation. Instead of asking “how can we best translate this concept into our own system” it asks “how can we change our system so that it can understand this concept which resists classification”.

That’s why the journal is called HAU — Mauss’s analysis of the Maori concept of the ‘spirit of the gift’ is the paradigmatic example of this sort of ethnographic theory. And the reason that they called the ‘HAU’ instead of ‘SPIRIT OF THE GIFT’ is that the original Maori word includes meaning and resonances that the English translation doesn’t. And those resonances and meanings are what are productive, what produce innovation in us. Or better, what elicit it or pull it out of us by their foreigness.

It’s an interesting idea, no? To me the idea is very attractive, and as a Chicago-trained anthropologist I will now do the greatest honor I can to something I appreciate and enjoy: attempt to destroy it. Sorry Giovanni — it’s what they trained me to do!

Some Questions and Concerns

Part of what is appealing about the notion of ethnographic theory is the way that it cunningly reverses what many anthropologists think our discipline is supposed to do: make the strange familiar. Instead, the goal is to make the strange as strange as possible — to honor, welcome, embrace, and perhaps even emphasize its strangeness. In America, this smacks of ‘orientalism’ which we all automatically know is ‘bad’. But here, intriguingly, othering involves moral validation.

This stance is familiar to those of us who remember the bad old days of the Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate. That debate was basically about how best to honor indigenous people: Sahlins argued we should do it by emphasizing and validating their legitimate difference, while Obeyesekere argued this task was best accomplished by emphasizing our common humanity.

Both, in other words, represented the two moments of recognition that Charles Taylor talks about in his essay on “The Politics of Recognition”. Contrary to what you might expect from the subject positions of the two authors (Obeyesekere the third world elite, Sahlins the first world working-class intellectual) it is Sahlins who pursues a politics of difference and Obeyesekere who pursues a politics of universalism.

In many ways, this emphasis on recognizing otherness is akin to certain flavors of poststructural politics, such as a politics of performance a la Judith Butler, where the goal is to destablize hegemonic norms by revealing the excess which they must elide in order to make themselves taken for granted. It is for this reason that I — and probably I alone — see Butler and Sahlins as kindred spirits. But that is a topic for another day.

Many influences by Sahlins (such as Ira Bashkow and Rupert Stasch) have continued to pursue a way to recuperate a morally positive recognition of difference, and I see HAU as operating within this genealogy, even if it lacks the Yankee obsession with politics and relevance.

Looking ethnographic theory with Manoa eyes (eyes keenly focused on the politics of Pacific and Indigenous scholarship) I have my doubts as well. In an extremely obvious way, this is a project that engages indigenous ideas, not actual indigenous people (much less indigenous scholars). Some might object that the authors clearly state that they are “speaking of alien concepts, which are by no means limited to those drawn from strange and romantic places” (vii). But, to be frank, does anybody actually buy this?

I don’t see a role for indigenous anthropology (i.e. by and for indigenous anthropologists) in this program at all. Nor do I see — as one would expect if the program was committed to ethnography everywhere and not just ‘exotic’ spaces — any account of how one could do ethnography of their own first-world location. Here again HAU’s title is telling: cultural difference seems necessary, not incidental, to the program. When we see a piece on standard average european concepts made strange, maybe I will change my tune — if, that is, that piece doesn’t fall into the familiar trap of making the first-world working class ‘the other’. An essay on how the concept of ‘monster trucks’ expands our anthropological imagination will not cut it.

I feel clichéd saying this, but the concept of ethnographic theory also seems to ignore the real and enduring fact of colonialism, and the political economic processes that make the kinds of subjects like ‘ethnographers’ and ‘informants’ who in fact are commensurable with each other because of shared (colonial) world-historical experience. Just how alien are we from one another? And if the political effects of eliding the colonialism inside of white anthropologists are palatable, what do we think of an approach that, in some variations, decries Pacific islanders as inauthentic for not conforming to the lifeways described in books written a century ago?

The negative stereotype is this: ‘Ethnographic theory’ as a parlor game in which elite academic weave ever more obscurantist essays for each other inspired by their brush with ‘the exotic’ in the name of a project of getting intellectually high. I don’t think ethnographic theory does this all the time, or necessarily will do this (although frankly, sometimes at conferences I can’t help but get this feeling as people invoke white holes, quantum physics, and Papuan longhouses). Indeed, one of the best parts about HAU is that it might broaden the horizons of those who are used to doing ethnographic theory inside the ivory tower, thus opening it up not only to ‘us’ but opening ‘them’ up by exposure to ‘us’.

What Ethnographic Theory Doesn’t Do

The authors of HAU are not interested in many things that social scientists could do or aspire to do — indeed, some of their project was formulated specifically in reaction to these aspirations. For the sake of giving Michael E. Smith the opportunity to remind us once again that he has resigned from the AAA, I offer a list of some things Ethnographic theory can’t or doesn’t want to do:

Generalize in the Name of Science: This is not generalizing social science. It doesn’t seek to explain anything.

Intervene: Ethnographic theory does not aim to be ‘useful’ in either the lefty applied/emancipatory fight the power kind of way, or the right-wing Project Camelot/HTS kind of way. It doesn’t seem to be ‘good’ for anything except possibly expanding your consciousness, which some may claim has some sort of broad effect.

Be Public: Let’s face it, the style of much of this writing can be off-putting even for academics. This is not something intended for a general audience.

Collaborate: Fieldwork may involve a deep appreciation of local communities, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of cowriting with them.

Of course, few people want an anthropology that does all of these things, and there’s nothing wrong with not doing them. I include this list only to describe some of the desiderata that people might want in anthropology and how they are situated in relation to the project of ethnographic theory.

Further Reading

The foreward to HAU is very, very short and I chose it to publicize the journal as well as provide something that is a bite-sized chunk of this school of thought. Fuller treatments are abound, and many of them are open access. Tony Crook and Justin Schaffner’s article in HAU “Roy Wagner’s ‘Chess of Kinship’: An Opening Gambit” is a great overview of this school of thought (I thought about assigning it), especially if you know anything about Melanesia. Frankly, you will probably get more out of it than Roy’s article itself. Over at Tipití, another great open access journal, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation” is a great over view of VdC’s thought, which directly influenced the forward to HAU. Let’s face it — although open access anthropology can be hard to find if you don’t know where to look, some of the best and most cutting-edge stuff is out there, as HAU well demonstrates.

In Conclusion

In conclusion, I think the idea of ethnographic theory is exciting, coherent, and offers a way forward for anthropology — and when was the last time you said that about something published in American Ethnologist? But at the same time I feel a little ambivalent, and I’m not completely sold. I’d be interested in hearing your comments and feedback. I’ve tried to be critical but gracious, and I hope that I’ve been successful. So please do the same and keep the tone constructive — remember, the authors are listening, and even well-meaning criticism can come across the wrong way on Teh Internetz, so let’s try to encourage some collegiality here.

I’ll keep this post up until Wednesday, when I’ll make another reading suggestion based on how the conversation in the comments goes. Thanks for reading and thanks for discussing!

As an up and coming academic, I’m willing to put my career on the line and promise to only publish in open access journals. Putting my career on the line is a very real threat, since many departments look for publications in key (generally not open access) journals such as American Anthropologist when hiring. However, I’m confident that the people who will be evaluating me will overlook those issues if they understand why I made this choice, and will evaluate my work on its own merits and not on the journal that publishes it.

I wish I could do the same, but unfortunately I can’t and I wish to share the reason why. The fact is that in much of the world (and in the US as well) there has been a move towards quantification in determining academic promotion and tenure. Taiwan, where I live and work, is has been particularly bad in this regard, as they struggle to raise the number of Taiwanese universities listed in international university rankings.

Taiwan does not have tenure, but one has a series of mandatory reviews as one proceeds from Assistant to Associate to Full Professor. The guidelines for these reviews are mandated in a very top-down way from the Ministry of Education (MoE) and there is little leeway in how these rules are interpreted at the university level. (One of the legacies of the martial law period in Taiwan is that the personnel office reports directly to the MoE, not the university president.) However, one way in which universities do vary with the official rules is in the informal requirement that professors have a minimum number of publications in SSCI listed journals (or SCI for the sciences). Universities thus compete to make the official rules stricter rather than more flexible.

On a side note, these requirements are interesting because SSCI journals are mostly in English, so Taiwan has created a separate Chinese-language TSSCI list, but they are counted less than the SSCI journals (even though they are often harder to get published in). Taiwan is somewhat unique in having the TSSCI list—universities in Hong Kong and Singapore focus more on SSCI. (Taiwanese academic Albert Tzeng has done some research on this.)

In any case, the problem I face is that I already struggle under the burden that my documentary filmmaking garners me zero points under this quantitative regime. Even book chapters count for very little here. And if the top journals in your field are not SSCI, tough luck. Moreover I don’t know of any SSCI listed Open Access journals in anthropology. I know there are some in other fields, but none that I know of in anthropology. My hope is that HAU will eventually earn this distinction, but that will take some time. Till then, I’m afraid I can’t follow Jeremey’s brave example. To keep my job I have to strive to publish a certain minimum of articles in SSCI publications, after which I will have the freedom to publish elsewhere if I please. I’m sharing this so that OA advocates can be more aware of some of the constraints scholars in other countries might face in submitting work to their journals.

Where is our discipline going? The good news is that because we can’t currently answer this question, we have a chance to try to do so in open and transparent forums.

In other words, we need to not just notice open access publications, and just resolve to cite them, we need to read them and talk about them: the key activity that comes between these two moments. The key to publicizing open access scholarship is to make it part of the conversation.

I’d like to get the ball rolling by trying an experiment. Every week for the foreseeable future I will (if all goes well) point to a piece of open access scholarship and suggest that everyone read it, say on Wednesday. On Friday I’ll post an entry saying what I think of it, and ask you all to comment. I’ll let the comments run until Wednesday, when I’ll post another piece. Sound easy enough, eh?

There’s no better place to start than HAU, which as come out of the gate so strongly. In particular, David Graeber and Giovanni Da Col’s introduction to the first volume is well worth reading for the vivid prose and possibly-groundbreaking paradigm of ‘ethnographic theory’. Best of all, the presentation is very brief, only three pages long. Are you telling me you can’t read three pages before Friday? So come on and grab an OA PDF of the introduction, read the first three pages (and of course as much of the rest as you want) and stop by the blog on Friday afternoon (Honolulu time) to tell me what you think. Who knows, it could be the start of a beautiful relationship.

People have suggested some concrete steps to take in the mean time, some positive and some negative. On the whole, I think the positive ones will be more successful (although boycotting peer review duties for AAA publications sounds like a good idea), even if the enormity of their task — reformatting the entire communication system for our discipline — is almost ridiculously daunting.

I’ve talked in the past about some of the things that need to be put into place — for instance, a ‘civil service’ of people to produce journals, a way to alert people when new articles are published. A lot more needs to take place, but today I want to focus on just two of them: open access needs to acquire some cultural capital, and it needs to demonstrate that its production values are as high as those provided by Wiley.

(that shouldn’t be too hard — once again, the latest issue of Cultural Anthropology is available on Wiley’s site, but not on AnthroSource. I pointed out this problem ten months ago and it’s still not fixed. So much for ‘access to content’.)

It’s for this reason that I think we need to revisit and pay close attention to the inaugural issue of HAU. Compared to other disciplines, anthropology has not had much trouble taking Open Access seriously. Many of the au courant theorists embrace the new and made their names with genre experimentation. I remember how gratified I was by Paul Rabinow’s attendance at an early open access gathering at AAAs, and I remain gratified by Michael Fischer’s continued interest in the movement. But crazy-ass postmodernists are one thing, HAU is another. This is a journal that includes pieces by Marshall Sahlins (who has supported copyright reform for ages) and Laura Nader. HAU is so important because it represents the way the opposite end of anthropology also embraces open access. Think about this for a second: when was the last time Marshall Sahlins and Michael Fischer agreed on anything? At this point I really think that it is safe to say that the only people who firmly oppose open access are not anthropologists, but the employees at the American Anthropological Association who are hanging on to an ever-more unsustainable business model which drives them into the arms of for-profit publishers.

HAU is not perfect — yes, I’ve found a few typos here and there — but there is no doubt that it has all of the polish and shine of a professional journal. And the occasional typos it does have just make us ask: how much do we really care about typos? Are we willing to ransom our discipline’s future to the need to make sure Wiley pays someone to copy edit our publications? Personally, I’m not. But that’s because I’m one of the worst spellers on the planet. So cracking the nut of copy editing is something to add to the to-do list. Or rather, HAU get’s to add to the to-do list, since they are the trailblazers in this respect.

Beyond the journal articles, HAU’s archival section is a third important aspect of the journal. Most of the time when we free up classic content we put it in a repository and then people hear about it…. how? By getting the rights to classic material and publishing it open access in a journal, HAU combines the best of repository building with the alerting and discovery functions of a serial. Instead of “we now have 10,000 articles in our repository” they can say “this month, why not read this classic article by Leach?” It’s a great way to bring stuff to people’s attention — read: shove it in their PDF libraries — even if they don’t have the time to read it right away.

HAU has been received great fanfare because it is the first “high-end” (as the editors put it) open access general journal of anthropology. Is it all it’s cracked up to be? The answer, as far as I can tell, is: yes. Of course, I can’t really say my endorsement is made with a great deal of objectivity. True, I’ve only been peripherally involved in the journal: I wrote a blurb for them (which makes me a member of the ‘editorial board’, apparently) and I’ve had lunch with one of the editors. But my connection lies deeper, because many of the authors involved are in my personal network.

So rather than take my word for it, why don’t you see for yourself and check out the journal today?

We’ve tried to explain why it is important.

We’ve written a lot about it.

But nothing seems to have changed.

What can we do to make anthropologists care about open access? To make them care what the AAA says about open access?

[This is an open thread for constructive suggestions about how mobilize for open access, not a place to rehash old debates about the merits of open access. Thanks!]

But, in case you don’t feel like scrolling right now, how about a couple of nice selections from the AAA response:

We write today to make the case that while we share the mutual objective of enhancing the public understanding of scientific enterprise and support the wide dissemination of materials that can reach those in the public who would benefit from such knowledge (consistent with our association’s mission), broad public access to information currently exists, and no federal government intervention is currently necessary.

Also:

We know of no research that demonstrates a problem with the existing system for making the content of scholarly journals available to those who might benefit from it.

Emphasis mine in both cases.  Take the time to check out the comments, which you can download as a PDF and share with your friends and colleagues (just an idea).  Comments?  Thoughts?

Update: Here is the direct link to the PDF of the AAA comment.

Update II: A few reactions from around the web:

Daniel Lende: American Anthropological Association Takes Public Stand Against Open Access

Dienekes Pontikos: The American Anthropological Association opposes open science

Michael E. Smith: American Anthropological Association joins the dark side of the force (with appropriate imagery)

Update III: For some background on what’s wrong with the RWA, check out this post by Barbara Fister

Update IV: Kristina Killgrove makes an excellent point about grad students who find themselves outside of the system, here.

Carr starts off the post by expressing his concern that academia is using practices like peer review as a way to segregate itself from wider audiences.  He argues that peer review is, at heart, not a bad thing, since it provides a way of vetting ideas in an important way.  But, he writes:

the practice of peer review in contemporary academia has turned really problematic. Most respected journals are more expensive than ever, making access to them the near-sole province of academics with access to libraries willing to purchase such journals. The pressure to publish increases all the time, both in rising demands on individual researchers (my requirements for tenure were much tougher than most requirements from a generation before) and in terms of an ever-expanding academic community.

One of the deeper issues, Carr argues, is that peer review can be riddled with politics that end up “slowing the flow of innovative ideas into academia” because those ideas may “run contrary to previously-accepted ideas upon which many reviewers might have done their work.”  Ultimately, Carr writes, these issues with peer review certainly don’t do much to help with the public image of academia (although he is speaking more specifically to geographers here, this applies to academics in general).

Here’s Carr’s solution, or, at least, his ideas for a way to start digging out of this trench:

So, a modest proposal: senior colleagues of mine in Geography – yes, those of you who are full professors at the top of the profession, who have nothing to lose from a change in the status quo at this point – who will get together and identify a couple of open-access, very low-cost journals and more or less pronounce them valid (probably in part by blessing them with a few of your own papers to start). Don’t pick the ones that want to charge $1500 in publishing fees – those are absurd. But pick something different . . .

Again, although he is speaking directly to other geographers here, I think this proposal applies to and should resonate with the anthropological crowd as well.  For Carr, such a move would be a critical step for opening up academic publishing to wider possibilities, conversations, and collaborations.  I agree, and I think he is right that certain established faculty members are in an important position for inciting and promoting change.  It’s a matter of interest and desire.

At the same time, coming from the position of a graduate student, I can’t help but wonder how those of us on the, well, lower rungs of the academic ladder, can do to actively foster these kinds of changes.  Since we are all encouraged to publish publish publish, maybe it would be a good idea to start thinking more strategically about how and why we are publishing, and more importantly WHO we decide to publish with.  If every graduate student and new professor is constantly upholding the current regime by basically giving up the fruits of their labor (and effectively providing certain publishers with a never-ending stream of valuable products), why WOULD anything change?  So, in the end, I think that Carr is definitely right, but that many of these changes are going to have to start taking place on multiple fronts as well.

On that note, check this out.

The other side of the ‘can’ question is one of publicity: behind closed doors someone somewhere within the AAA may be giving the nod to whatever lobbiest we are allied with to oppose (or support) the AAA. Do they have the integrity to tell their membership what they are doing in our name? I am guessing that the answer is ‘no’, simply because any sort of public statement of this sort of back room dealing would immediately raise questions about proper procedure at AAA, which is exactly the topic these informal dealings are attempting  to avoid.

So: can the AAA successfully, publicly, and in a timely fashion announce a policy decision it has made or will we have to wait 8 months for the next AAA meetings and a DOA panel entitled something like ‘HR 3699:  An Important Topic Having To Do With $This_Year’s_Conference_Theme_Branding”?

I’m hopeful, but I’m not holding my breath.

They haven’t yet, but they are supporting SOPA, a bill that attempts to roll back Web 2.0 by making it easy to shut down entire sites like wikipedia and craigslist if they contain any user-submitted infringing material. (Here is a hypothetical airline-oriented version of SOPA, with only a little hyperbole about planes in the air.)

I think that appealing to Elsevier’s love of open scientific discourse is misguided. Individual employees there might be civic-minded, but ultimately they have $10 billion worth of reasons not to let the internet drive the costs of scientific publishing down to zero. Fortunately, their business model relies on the help of governments and academics. We can do our part to stop them by not publishing in, or refereeing for, their journals (the link describes other unethical Elsevier practices). Of course, this is easy to say in physics, harder in computer science, and a lot harder in fields like medicine.

That was via this post (thanks to Paul Manning on FB).  Michael E. Smith over at Publishing Archaeology is on it with news about related issues as well.  Now, some words from John Hawks about the NIH, public funded research, and open access:

Today’s NIH repository and the data access provisions of NSF grants were established by acts of Congress in the late 1990s. In my opinion, the agencies have in many areas gotten away with the bare minimum of compliance with these regulations. Worse, far from strengthening open access to publications and data, some in Congress want to reverse them. The current effort owes much to lobbying by academic publishers, and large campaign donations from officers and employees of those publishers to key Congressmen.

Read the rest of Hawks’ post here.  Just a few days ago, Rex wrote a post here on SM called “Why HR 3699 Sucks.”  Oh, and it does suck.  If you haven’t read it, then read it now.  He uses a nice analogy to explain what’s going on with academia and publishing, comparing the fruits of academic labor with public works like roads and highways.  Imagine if we all had to pay tolls to actually use highways and roads that are funded by public money.  Get it?  Ya, that’s what’s going on.  Here’s where Rex really lays down what’s what when it comes to the current state of open access affairs:

I can see why Big Content is afraid: we, the construction workers, engineers, and planners, are all willing to work for free to make roads for whoever wants to use them, and we have free software that basically will run all the back office stuff. Do you see the beauty of this situation? It’s the executives, not the workers, who are afraid of being laid off once people realize that 90% of the people actually building the roads can do it without the help of the guys in suits.

Now it might be true that the small amount of work that these back office types do is of a higher caliber than that done by our automated software. But it might not be — and they are working hard to make sure that we don’t find out which way the cookie crumbles.

In case you haven’t gotten the punchline yet: academic publishing is highway robbery, and academic publishers make Rupert Murdoch look like a socialist.

Now, go back and read the rest.  Be sure to read the other links too.  Then feel free to provide your own responses, thoughts, and links in the comments section here.  As John Hawks reminds us: “public comment on access to federally funded research ends this Thursday, January 12.”  From Michael E. Smith: “For more information about the bill and about WHAT U.S. CITIZENS CAN DO about this, see the Alliance for Taxpayer Access.”  Thoughts?

Now imagine one day you wake up, get in your car, and find a toll booth at the entrance to your local freeway or artery.

“What’s going on?” you ask.

“The government recently passed a law making it illegal for government agencies to allow you to use public works just because you’ve paid the taxes that create them,” says the attendant at the toll booth.

“That’s crazy,” you say.

“I guess they were worried that all of the contractors would go out of business if people just used roads funded by federal money.”

“Is it like a jobs thing, like they’re afraid all the construction guys are going to be out of a job if the government doesn’t step in? Like to protect the economy?”

“On the contrary,” the attendant says, “all of the construction workers are volunteers, from the guy operating the backhoe to the surveyors. It’s the accountants and CEOs in the back office who are earning salaries, and they’re raking in millions every year.”

It seems impossible, right? But if you replace roads with journals, you pretty much get the picture of what house bill 3699 will do: it will make it impossible for government agencies to mandate that you have the right to read the research that you as a tax payer have already paid for.

Actually, it gets stranger than that. Today we live in a world where we drive on roads mostly for free, but most government-funded research is behind a toll booth. HR 3699 is not designed to keep us from enjoying what we already rightfully are using every day, it is designed to make sure that the toll booths don’t get taken off the road.

The logic used by its proponents is even more bizarre: they are afraid that the roads (journals) will become unsafe and dangerous unless we continue to subsidize the salaries of the small number of back-office people who do very little of the work of producing journals but make all of the money.

I can see why Big Content is afraid: we, the construction workers, engineers, and planners, are all willing to work for free to make roads for whoever wants to use them, and we have free software that basically will run all the back office stuff. Do you see the beauty of this situation? It’s the executives, not the workers, who are afraid of being laid off once people realize that 90% of the people actually building the roads can do it without the help of the guys in suits.

Now it might be true that the small amount of work that these back office types do is of a higher caliber than that done by our automated software. But it might not be — and they are working hard to make sure that we don’t find out which way the cookie crumbles.

In case you haven’t gotten the punchline yet: academic publishing is highway robbery, and academic publishers make Rupert Murdoch look like a socialist.

It’s not clear to me that HR3699 will get very far in the legislative process but the sooner we academics start pushing back against craziness like this the better, especially given the conflict about SOPA that is on the horizon.

We are ‘alerted’ (made aware) of new content in AAA journals because the AAA ‘pushes’ alerts to us — in the old days, they used to actually send you a paper copy of the journal. These days there are email alerts, twitter alerts, and other ways of reaching anthropological audiences. A lot of these methods are opt-in, so you have to actually go sign up to receive emails about new issues. But because we interact with the AAA website and organization regularly, it is much easier to get people to sign up for these alerts.

If you are the kind of person who already knows about Tipiti and reads it regularly, on the other hand, then you are already savvy enough to hunt down some of the more obscure edges of the Internet for open access content. But how will the more mainstream anthropologists get signed up for alerting and be able to locate content from these journals?

It’s an interesting question. I’m increasingly thinking that as the amount of open access material increases we need to build services on top of it to aid discovery — as the old methods of publication change the old ways that scholars process them will probably have to change as well.

These journals are small and specialized — despite the size of the Pacific, the scholarly community is pretty small — but despite this they are all being made more and more available online. Or maybe I should say because of this. I also think that we, like the physicists, are a group of people with a strong sense of community and a commitment to the values of our discipline — and the Pacific is a place where people value share and community.

I was absolutely thrilled to learn the other day, for instance that Pacific Studies has posted over thirty years of back issues available for free on its website. This contains a lot of great articles, including both ‘classics’ and work that is still relevant today.

Here at the University of Hawaii the Center for Pacific Island Studies has done a superb job of making its work available open access. This material deserves far more attention than it gets. It includes a occasional papers series that began with relatively staid titles like Pacific-Related Audiovisual Materials for Secondary Schools to truly new and exciting scholarship by Pacific Islanders such as Indigenous Encounters: Reflections on Relations Between People in the Pacific edited by Katerina Teaiwa and The Space Between: Negotiating Culture, Place, and Identity in the Pacific by Marata Tamaira.

Moreover, CPIS (yes, they call it ‘sea-piss’. Get over it) has put over twenty years of The Contemporary Pacific online as well for people to read and download. TCP (as its known) is more than an anthropology serial — it’s a deeply engaged journal committed to life in the Pacific and has led the way in Pacific cultural studies and in creating opportunities for Pacific Islanders to publish. It’s an incredible resource for anyone interested in our neck of the woods.

The University of the South Pacific is also moving forward to open up some of its journal the Journal of Pacific Studies (which is different from Pacific Studies, which is published by Brigham Young University-Hawaii). Pacific Studies currently has 8 volumes of its back issues available open access and has abstracts and tables of contents for the remaining issues online.

We have a long way to go — most of the Australian journals are in the hands of Wiley, for instance, but I think sometimes we wring our hands about the fate of our journals without reminding ourselves of the resources out there already. In the case of the Pacific, it seems more and more that the challenge is building software and tools that will help non-experts discover and use the content that is already available… and that is a great problem to have!

(Update: Pei-yi Guo points out that Pacific Asia Inquiry is also available open access. It’s young yet, but the second issue is chock full of great people. Back issues of the intriguing ISLA: Journal of Micronesian Studies are also available and I use them in teaching sometimes.

Also, although I totally forgot to mention it, the Journal de le Société des Océanistes is also available online for more or less all of its back catalog. Don’t be fooled by the accents aigus — a good chunk of the articles are in English and there are some classic and important pieces in there. Alternately if Dutch colonialism is more your thing, the Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde features more adatsrecht than you can shake a stick at, all open access.

And last but certainly not least, the mac-daddy of them all (is there a hyphen in mac-daddy?) the Journal of the Polynesian Society has an absolutely sick amount of material up on their website. ) 

Ryan Anderson: I think this last point you make about the direct role that faculty and graduate students play in all this is really important. We all have choices, and ultimately the publishing and communication system is what we make of it. So, as a last question for you, what advice do you have for people who are interested in these issues but unsure where to start looking for others who share similar concerns, values, and commitments?

Jason Baird Jackson: The open access community is by its very nature, open. In North American and European contexts, finding folks eager to help students and established scholars negotiate these questions is pretty easy. If one is at a university with a research- oriented library, there will be one or more librarians specializing in these issues. Such librarians often lead workshops on such topics as “author’s rights,” “copyright issues for scholars,” and “open access.” Librarians have a strong service ethic and are usually very eager to help scholars get their bearings on these topics. They are SO eager to find faculty allies on these questions. If you give them a moment, they will also passionately explain why OA matters so much to the future of the library and its public service mission.

While research libraries at larger universities are often a center of gravity for information and resources on these topics, librarians at teaching colleges are often just as energized and knowledgeable about these matters because, given their scale and budgets, open access is even more important to them as they seek to serve their campuses. Librarian Barbara Fister at Gustavus Adolphus College is a great example. She writes wonderful columns on these topics for Inside Higher Education and Library Journal. She’s the kind of thinker, activist, and explainer who is very accessible online. I have already mentioned Peter Suber and the explanatory resources that he has assembled with the help of the larger community.

There are organizations working on the creation of educational resources and tools that scholars should know about. In addition to organizations and databases that I have already mentioned, I would want colleagues to know about the Creative Commons and its work in this area. The Creative Commons website is a place to begin. There one can find great explanatory videos and other resources. Of special relevance within The Creative Commons organization are its science efforts, including the Science Commons project and the Scholar’s Copyright Project.

Also relating specifically to OA, SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) is a great organization with great resources.

Open Access Week, held each fall, is a major opportunity for educational projects and efforts worldwide.

The work of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University is also vital to the development of this sector. CHNM works at the point where scholarly communications issues meet the digital humanities and open source software development. They make invaluable software tools like Zotero, and Omeka and have organized innovative projects such as the OA book Hacking the Academy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), to which I contributed a small essay on scholarly communications.

Its good for scholars to better understand the actual links connecting open access scholarship and open source software. Available itself in an OA edition, Chris Kelty’s book Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008) addresses this link. Key to much work in open access are open source software platforms such as Open Journal Systems and DSpace. In some ways technical protocols that allow open access projects to talk with one another and share information are even more important. The most crucial of these is the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Just as I wish more of us were working to understand who pays the bills for the current scholarly communications system, I also wish more of us appreciated the ways that technical systems and choices were alternatively closing down or opening up opportunities for the circulation and preservation of our scholarship.

Just as open access has ties to alternative intellectual property systems such as the Creative Commons and to free software/open source software projects, it is also connected to efforts at creating and sharing freely available educational resources with students and lifelong learners. This domain is called Open Educational Resources (OER). Scholars can investigate OER efforts such as Connexions, OER Commons, and MIT OpenCourseWare.

Talking about software development and metadata protocols is a terribly boring way to end our conversation. If our colleagues would like to be introduced to this world in a more fun way, there are many very accessible videos that have been produced to address the issues we have been discussing. Among my favorites are a great series of five one minute videos produced in German and English by OA advocates in Germany and a really hilarious critique of commercial scholarly publishing by Alex O. Holcombe called “Scientist Meets Publisher.” Its not funny like the Holcombe piece, but a very helpful introduction to “Author’s Rights” for scholarly authors is a video by SPARC on Blip.tv.

In our corner of scholarship, there is a vibrant community of anthropologists and folklorists working towards the goals of OA. There are new journals and projects coming online all the time. The circle of scholars joining the conversation is expanding and thus we have more and more colleagues to turn to for help and more opportunities to contribute meaningfully to the effort as individuals. Given the relationship between much of our scholarship and the (often disadvantaged) communities within which we work, our fields have an extra-ordinarily good set of reasons for making OA work. If the physicists can find a way to do it, certainly we can as well.

RA: That’s a great point to end with.  And I agree with you that we have plenty of reasons to work toward OA.  Thanks for taking the time to do this interview, Jason.  I hope we can keep these conversations going, here and elsewhere.

JBJ: Thank you very much Ryan for this opportunity and for all of the ways that you are working towards OA goals.