At the same time, I know that there is concern, and even skepticism, about the way that OA will be funded. Here’s where I have to be a little circumspect, but I won’t be cagey. First, we all recognize the fact the Open Access does NOT mean FREE. There are costs, significant costs, involved in publishing, and we have to be prepared to pay them in order to maintain the high quality – the “awesomeness” of CA that Chris describes above. That IS the value of our journal, and it takes investments to maintain in it. What I can say is that we are not proceeding without a safety net. The SCA is fortunate right now to have the resources to get this initiative off the ground – indeed, the SCA has already paid for a significant amount of infrastructure that will allow us to go to open access. We do not NEED the royalties from Anthrosource, and we are not depending on them to finance this effort – though there will still be revenues from this, and we don’t see those revenues as incompatible with open access. Our library partners have paid Wiley Blackwell sizable subscription costs, and we will continue to provide them with CA, and we’ll benefit from the downloads that library patrons make. Further, let me point out that the SCA is now the largest section of the AAA, and we have seen our membership grow substantially in recent years. That is not only a comment on the success of SCA programs and publishing; it is also revealing that in the very era when membership in the AAA guarantees you access to ALL of the AAA journals, even if you’re not a member of a given section, people have continued to join and maintain their membership in SCA. That is, even though you can get our journal for “free” with your AAA membership, people still want to pay for the privilege of being a member of a society that is doing (here I’m just citing Chris again) awesome things. We trust that going OA is the kind of thing that our members want to pay to support – this is the NPR model of membership that Charlie Piot talked about in the Chronicle. This kind of support can make a huge difference to ensure and sustain the financing of open access.

Yes, there are loads more questions about what comes next – print on demand, library partnerships, licensing, archival formats, etc. We’ve got a bit of time to figure those things out in more detail. And we’ve got great, knowledgeable people working on these questions. And the SCA encourages all of you to participate in these discussions in whatever way you can; send me an email – 1bradweiss@gmail.com – with your ideas, join the SCA, nominate editors. We’re eager to see what you’ve got to say; and, for my part, I will say that I’m really lucky to have been able to work on a project that I think is tremendously important for the future of anthropology and scholarship more generally.

@Kerim, thanks for this post! I think AAA needs to rethink revenue allocation for sure, but short of that we need to think about how to generate revenue beyond Anthrosource. While those downloads give us some revenue, it falls short of sustaining us and it’s certainly not going to sustain us once we hit 2014. But it is something. We also need to think about how production costs are going to change with the move to OA as well.

There are a few possibilities on the table for how we might generate revenue to support the journal, although I wish we had more. Personally, I really like the way Chris is thinking about the value of journals and publishing above…

I read your Chhara article in DNA. Sound anthropological observation and advocacy.

Re: Anthrosource. This is truly a boondoggle– but it is impossible for the AAA to get itself out of this mess easily. But I no longer think it is the AAA’s fault– I think it is Wiley-Blackwell’s fault. They simply cannot imagine providing the services that AAA wants (i.e. that members get access to all AAA publications through a convenient interface)–they want to control what is bundled with what and sell those bundles to libraries.

One thing that needs to happen, I think, is that the AAA needs to change it’s attitude about the benefits of membership. It should be a benefit of membership that one can *publish* in a AAA journal, not that one can *read* the research– and it should be clear to members that by paying the reasonable dues asked of them that they subsidize a very large range of publications that would not be able to survive in the market without their support. We are anthropologists for God’s sake– we understand the nature of obligation and reciprocity. What makes AAA journals valuable is not the fact that people buy them– they are awesome because people want to publish in them–desperately in many cases. The AAA must start to align its business plan with this understanding of where the value comes from: it comes from the members who want to publish in the journals, not those who want to read it, overlapping though these groups be).

Agreed though about Anthrosource.