Comments on: Value, typos, editors

By: daveed

daveed — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 19:22:34 +0000

ok, i understand better now. Thanks for the tip.

“AE giving away little dribbles of content doesn’t actually make it any better than AnthroSource in terms of what really matters about letting information be free in any truly important sense.”

word.

By: Rex

Rex — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 02:22:12 +0000

ianal = I am not a lawyer
iirc = if I remember correctly.

I used the phrase “free as in beer” as opposed to “free as in speech.” This is a reference to a fundamental distinction made in the world of free software and copyright reform. You can read more about this distinction here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libre

My point was just that AE giving away little dribbles of content doesn’t actually make it any better than AnthroSource in terms of what really matters about letting information be free in any truly important sense.

By: daveed

daveed — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 01:44:23 +0000

Rex,

I didn’t quite understand your reply (e.g. i have no idea what the ianal and iirc are). If you meant I shouldn’t have put the link there, I’m sorry for that. And when i said open access, I meant “accessible to those who would merely like to read it without paying some ridiculous fee.” Obviously this does not even touch upon issues of copyright, open source, etc.

By: Jesse

Jesse — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 02:39:34 +0000

Actually, I still do citations by hand. I could use RefWorks, but I’m stubbornly sticking to WordPerfect until Word makes it easier to suppress page numbers, and RefWorks only uses Word. Plus, it’s Microsoft.

By: Comet Jo

Comet Jo — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 19:32:12 +0000

If you think this bugs you, you should tlak to David himself about it!

By: Rex

Rex — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 17:33:36 +0000

Thanks for this Daveed. I had no idea these reviews were available via the aaanet website. But it looks like while this review is free as in beer, it is not free or open in any other sense — there is still a copyright notice attached which reserves all rights to AES. Even the ‘allowances’ that the copyright notice makes — that you are free to link to the site — are in fact rights that all citizens have. Ianal but iirc linking to content is not something that a copyright holder can control.

By: daveed

daveed — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 12:34:17 +0000

One cavil:

why link to the paid page at AnthroSource (quite correctly lambasted in these pages by you and others) when AE book reviews are some of the only open access to academic output in anthropology (for those not AAA ‘associated’)? Here’s the free link: http://www.aaanet.org/aes/bkreviews/result_details.cfm?bk_id=589

By: des von bladet

des von bladet — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 09:09:21 +0000

BibTeX is a sack of shite in a wide variety of ways and anyone who says it isn’t is a fool, but it does keep in-text cites and bibliographies in sync, which is more than I’d manage without it.

It’s extraordinary that _anyone_ would be doing this stuff by hand!

By: oneman

oneman — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 00:26:50 +0000

THis is a problem that has infuriated me about a number of books, notably virtually everything from Routlege, and Thomas H. Eriksen’s _Engaging Anthropology_ (which I’m reading now). With a major “trade” publisher like Routlege, there’s simply no excuse — but with some of the smaller and academic-oriented presses, I’ve come across one thing that may be a contributing factor — some publishers require the author to provide a “camera-ready” manuscrupt, which means essentially that the work is self-edited and self-proofread. As academic publushers struggle to cut costs, I can see more and more outsourcing the traditional work of the publisher to the author him- or herself; ditto with the rise of DIY publishing outlets like Lulu.