Let’s also be clear that what the AAA Executive Board says or believes is not the same thing as what the staff of the AAA says or believes. The former is supposed to guide the latter. It is clear that this rule is honored only in the breach. If the AAA was actually in support of OA they would have been listening to its members 5 or 10 years ago.

When I hear AAA staff members stop talking about how hard it is to imagine a world with OA and start talking about the real sacrifices that need to be made, then I will believe that they support it.

@J K Hart, It sounds like you are just about ready to make OAC into a professional society 🙂 If you hold a conference, I will come. But of course, we all know how daunting it is to actually run an organization, as opposed to just being an anthropologist within one, which is what most of us want to do, so maybe we also need to ask the question, “who runs the AAA and why? What do they get out of it? Why do they do it?” If we can figure that out, then maybe we can find ways to make them change and be more like OAC.

@Paul Absolutely– but you are talking mostly about ongoing costs. This is why WB is so evil: they buy up journal after journal from scholarly societies, they streamline them to the point where they don’t have to spend any new money from issue to issue and they make You and Me do all the work. For this they charge our libraries an enormous fee to access it. It sin’t just that you are exploited as an editor or me as a peer reviewer– we are then exploited again via a libraries who are forced to pay money they might otherwise use to make our resources better at a local level.

However, it does take money to make changes, to improve, or to start a journal, and the AIA is right about this so long as they are serious about actually responding to and working with their editors. If they act like WB, then I say to the devil with them… but if they actually work with their editors and are responsive, and make changes that academics think are necessary, then that is costly. There are also a lot of sunk costs in the salaries of staff who, though they may not appear to do anything, are working stiffs like you and me trying to do a good job. Their labor may be invisible to us, but it is there, I assure you.

The first question regards the cost of peer review and disemmination.

Is it true that, in the hard sciences, the cost for publication is included in the grant provided to the researcher?

Even if this is so, given the pace of research in the hard sciences (rather than ideological reasons) important scientific journals publish online either simultaneously or ahead of the hard copy format. From what I understand, neither format is open access.

We can, with a visit to a university library that is open to the public (read “public university”), read any journal that they house or subscribe to online for free. Of course, the wealthier libraries subscribe to more journals.

Therefore, open access online takes this to a whole new level. Who pays for the cost of research peer review, and publication (site maintenance, etc) in this form of publishing?

Since the 1980s, the federal government has withered away in terms of sponsoring research, especially in the humanities and social sciences, while the pressure to publish has intensified enormously. Therefore, asking where the money comes from matters a great deal.

In addition, universities are under pressure for finding opportunities for undergrads and grad students to conduct research and publish throughout their careers–not just at the end. Again, grants in the hard sciences provide monies to bring undergrads into labs for work, to publish under the name of the teams, and to travel to conferences. The humanities and social sciences do not.

What does providing open access do for the financial straits of the “soft sciences” in research and publishing?

Paying for such research out of dues is increasingly difficult as salaries don’t keep up with STEM salaries or those in professional schools. And the increasing trend to hire adjuncts at much lower costs does not help a profession survive. Therefore, the profession itself is short of funds in all aspects.

Thanks for your help in orienting me to the debate.

Speaking as an erstwhile AAA editor, who knows a lot of other editors at various publishers, let me just say that (1) no one is paid money for the peer review process with manuscripts, this process is free from beginning to end, it is indeed done at NO COST, (2) the same goes for preparing the articles for publication, a AAA editor signs a memorandum of understanding which stipulates that the editorial office, which has a budget of zero dollars (that was our budget and we stuck to it) will provide a manuscript that is 80=90 percent copy-edited to the publisher, and that all permissions are in hand, and that the photos are ready to print. (3) I like the fact that they wrote in ‘copywriters’ instead of copyeditors, but actually most copy-editing is done by the editors and the typesetters at many journals, if Elsevier does any copyediting I will eat my hat. Many journals and other publishers do little or no real copyediting. Copy-editing is probably the last persuasive sticking point, and it actually doesn’t cost that much. (4) Lastly, photo editors are people I have never heard of, but they didn’t exist in our production chain, we had a free program that we used that checked whether a photo would print or not, and if it wouldn’t I used some other freeware photo editing program to monkey with it until it would work, and (5) very lastly, designers do not work on individual issues, they are brought in at some cost if you get budgetary approval to to a make-over of the journal, it’s a one time thing, it costs, say, about 2000 dollars.

So basically, the reason publishing is very expensive, you will have to look elsewhere, because you will not find any real expenses in the production process.

I’m all for open-access, and do not give a wank that dichotomies like open/closed are weasel words that are hard to pin down. Less talk, more action (and thank you for starting OAC). Put your papers up on line so that the rest of us can see them. Blog and link, create repositories. Start new journals.

Trust me, its important to the rest of us; we want to be part of the conversation too. This is a ‘Luther’s translation of the Bible into the vernacular’ type of moment.

Now, excuse me while I go throw eggs at the university library that closed its doors in my face.

What is it that lies behind the drive for open access in this crisis for academic publishing and indeed for the universities? It is true that the loudest voices are American anthropologists fed up with their scholarly society. But these are temporary reactions to bureacracies being even mor totalitarian than usual. Proposed antidotes usually add up to no more than a software patch which leaves most of the problem unaddressed.

Reliance on a variety of expressions using “open” is part of the problem. It is a weasel word tied up with all the conflicts that come with seeking greater democracy in a historically specific unequal society. The pairs open/closed, free/necessary, public/private (linked to commons), equal/unequal are all entangled in ways that are conceptually confused. So open access means for some no payment. The big divide between free software and open source was over free speech not free beer (libre vs gratuit); and then when Linux went commercial some saw this as the end of the world, mostly Americans and Germans who operate with a gift/market opposition.

All of this is now tied up with Facebook. Then there is the threat to freedom of the i-cloud, of Apple’s, Google’s and Amazon’s monopolistic behaviour. The academics have sold the farm because they bought into the idea that commercial publishers decide who deserves promotion. But then someone who writes English as a second language needs good professional copyeditors to get their work into the English language sphere. It goes on and on, round and round. It needs Occam’s razor to cut through it all.

Three years ago the Open Anthropology Cooperative was formed in response to a similar cri de coeur to yours, Chris, and Matt’s, only that time from Kerim. We now have 6,000 members from around the world, but we are just now coming round to using our anthropology to understand what went wrong and how, if at all, to fix it. We thought we were a social movement at first, but became an inferior administration without the will to power. We are a lot more open than Savage Minds and there is enormous potential in the OAC.

So far, however, like most other reactions against the AAA and Wiley, we have been let down by our anthropological education which was meant to reflect the world, not to change it. We haven’t given up though and I for one still look to SM for inspiration, if not for the revolution we need.

I do a lot of exploring in disciplines far from my own, and there are few things more useful than finding a prominent scholar in an unfamiliar field who has posted all of his/her papers on their website. I wonder how many SM readers have posted their papers? Perhaps some enlightened groups (like anthro bloggers) could start using peer pressure to get our colleagues off their butts to upload their papers.