Thanks so much for this reply–I have to admit that I have a lot of reading to do when it comes to all of the details of OA and all of these publishing issues, so I really appreciate your info. I have been reading through a lot of your recent posts about this as well.

I definitely need to look into how I can work with the repository we have here at the U of Kentucky (you pointed me to this a few months back when I first started the anthropologies project). This definitely sounds like a good path to explore.

I wonder what it would take to get something like SSRN going for anthropology? Do you think anthros would be interested or willing to follow the lead of economists, etc? I definitely like the idea. Or would it be redundant to have an anthro version of the SSRN *and* work toward building these university-based repositories?

Thanks again. I hope this discussion keeps going here at SM and elsewhere.

(In my view…) The best place to place pre-prints, post-prints, and (if allowable) publisher versions is an institutional repository such as are found at some colleges and universities. Such repositories use the best technical infrastructure and are managed by librarians with the goals of interoperability, stability, sound migration practices, and preservation. All OA works need not live in the same place (repository) because information (metadata) is harvested by the search tools that we use (general ones like Google Scholar) and disciplinary one (like Open Folklore).

Funding agency sponsored repositories and subject repositories (such as PubMed Central or PolicyArchive.org) are especially good for those who lack a local institutional repository option.

Even if one does not have a home institution with a repository, it can be possible to work one’s ties to an institution that does have one as a means of gaining the ability to place one’s work there. (Playing on alumni status, research collaborations, etc.)

On a personal or departmental website, one can (ideally) provide links to the permanent, stable version’s of one work that live in a formal repository.

Especially for a manuscript that you do not want to see made available forever, a personal or departmental website is useful. There are some folks who cannot make a repository option work and, of course, a website is much better than nothing.

Rex may be able to provide a 2011 update on the Mana’o repository project that he catalyzed at Hawai’i. To my knowledge this is the furthest-along subject repository project in anthropology. I will be reporting on the Open Folklore project at the AAA meetings.

To learn about institutions that have adopted OA mandates, see the ROARMAP database at http://roarmap.eprints.org/

To consult a database of known OA repositories, consult the OpenDOAR databse at http://www.opendoar.org/

“What’s to stop us from doing so, aside from our own lack of gumption and satisfaction with our feeling of outrage?”

Now that’s a good question. So what is stopping anthros from publishing drafts, working papers, etc on something like SSRN?

@Jason Baird Jackson:

What platforms (SSRN, etc) do you think hold the most promise for something like this? Is there anything comparable already in place that anthros are taking part in?

They have effectively solved the open-access problem.

Economists publish drafts early, publicly, both on their own websites and on SSRN, a despository that literally the entire profession uses. They update those drafts as the paper evolves. The final draft is basically indistinguishable from the published version. By the time the published version comes out, drafts will usually have been available for around five years. It is not unusual for papers to become well-cited and well-known and never actually be published. And this is not a marginal strategy, this is the normal strategy, the high status strategy. Cf. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=18621 If you want to get a sense of how this looks.

1. Why would we ever expect big publishing to voluntarily give up its monopoly rents?
2. Why would we ever expect an abrupt rupture with the current regime, rather than growing a parallel regime, like economics did?
3. What’s to stop us from doing so, aside from our own lack of gumption and satisfaction with our feeling of outrage?

TB, I respect you, your colleagues, and everything you stand for… but get over yourself. If you really cared, you’d say ‘fck the manuscripts, most people read me and Im in a department that everyone is watching and something needs to be done and its clear that few are willing to put their tenure where their discipline is.’ We need a super hero, someone who has made a significant contribution whose name (along with their friends) will make everyone stop in their tracks, and force the discipline to really change sht. (((When was our last writing culture?))) Sahlins tried with the PPP, and other faculty from Nader onwards in his age set have tried, but we’re succumbing to the commoditization of academia and not giving a sht about it, while saying “OMGGG! OPEN ACESS PLZ!!!”
Don’t forget, we’re all complicit in making sure that the brilliant lesbian black girl from Tennessee state will never get read because she’s from Tennessee state (and she’s black, and she’s a she who isn’t writing in Rubin’s mode of making white sexuality feel natural for the discipline, or pandering to while/bourgeoisie guilt, and because her advisor isn’t a Ortner, etc. etc. etc.). Let’s hope for that girl that in her next life she’ll be an articulate Latina with janitors for parents, living in New Haven.

I wrote a comment but then tried to translate it, as Rex might, out of Jason-speak. The result was the following sentence.

Jason thinks that posting page proofs or typeset articles is usually illegal and that posting anything to one’s website is usually dumb and should only be a last resort in the absence of better options.

For anyone who needs to know why, I’ll just post my original at my website. Thanks go to Rex for reanimating my remarks.

http://imgur.com/3KpGk.png