Afaranesis has just published the second issue of our anthropology blog carnival, the Four Stone Hearth. Again we have had an excellent turn out, spanning a lot of the known blogosphere that I frequent. I am really impressed by the turn out and hope yo…

That’s not a bug its a “feature”! With thousands of SPAMs a day we have to implement pretty strong SPAM filtering. There are very few false-positives with our system, but unfortunately any comment with more than a couple of links is pretty certain to be considered SPAM. As you can see, I’ve recovered your lost post. Thanks for your comments.

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) has disbanded its “AnthroSource Steering Committee” because it had supported the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). Hardly a surprising outcome: Like the Royal Society and many other learned societies, the AAA has a strong publishing tail that manages to wag the AAA dog. And that tail does not wag the AAA in the interests of anthropological research or researchers. The resolution of this (undeniable) conflict of interest between researchers and their learned societies is very simple: It will not be their learned societies who ensure that Open Access is provided, free for all, but their institutions and funders, by mandating it, just as the FRPAA proposes to do (but with a few of the policy parameters fine-tuned to optimize them).

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum