This interview is part of an ongoing series about open access (OA), publishing, communication, and anthropology.  The first interview in this series was with Jason Baird Jackson (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).  The second interview, with Tom Boellstorff, is here.  The third installment of this OA series is with Keith Hart.* (See Part 1  here, Part 2 here)

Ryan Anderson: Let’s bring things back to the issue of OA and the academy.  You have said that many OA activists are inhibited from fighting against the privatization of the intellectual commons because they have already “bought into the premises of an academic career”.  Why do you mean by this?

Keith Hart: Intellectual life is intrinsically individualistic. We may like to think of ourselves as social creatures, but unfortunately they only hand out brains one at a time. Collaboration is particularly developed in the hard sciences and the academy has always depended on an informal cultural commons: teaching, seminars, conferences, free sharing of ideas, equal access to libraries and so on. Everyone wants personal recognition, but up to the 1950s, this aspect of academic life took a back seat to the university as a community of scholars, teachers and their students.

The Cold War and the drive to restore home food supplies after the Second World War boosted research on armaments and agriculture. The post-war boom saw lots of public money being directed to universities for research. Private companies also poured money into research on chemicals. Student enrolments took off in the 1960s, so that universities now became big business. We think of them as medieval institutions, but the late twentieth-century university was something unique, a mass production line for workers in bureaucracies and the main research arm of the state. The academics had always ruled their own institutions, but this expansion gave power to administrators. Research came to dominate other academic activities. The humanities and social sciences didn’t have much to offer, but they too jumped onto the research bandwagon. Continue reading →

This interview is part of an ongoing series about open access (OA), publishing, communication, and anthropology.  The first interview in this series was with Jason Baird Jackson (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).  The second interview, with Tom Boellstorff, is here.  The third installment of this OA series is with Keith Hart.*  (See Part 1  here)

Ryan Anderson: Earlier you referred to OA as “a strategy of resistance to privatization of the commons”.  Can you elaborate on that point?

Keith Hart: I meant that private property is still the great unresolved contradiction of modern society, not least because its ubiquity often makes society invisible. For Rousseau, the invention of private property was the origin of social inequality. The liberal Enlightenment looked to anthropology for the knowledge needed to realize a democratic revolution against the Old Regime. Morgan (followed by Engels) used Rousseau’s framework to make the history of unequal society the main object of a democratic anthropology. More recently, Lévi-Strauss, Wolf and Goody renewed this tradition, each in their own way. Now David Graeber has taken it up again. But the ethnographic turn made this a marginal current in twentieth century anthropology.

I grew up in a working class district of Manchester. The doors of our houses had to be kept open for neighbors to come in and out as they wished. Even inside the house, bedroom and bathroom doors were never closed. Privacy was the opposite of being open to the free flow of solidarity. I thought that spirit had gone forever, but I found it again when I moved to France fifteen years ago. Here the tradition of people occupying the streets (manifestation) is very much alive and the notion of a public sphere that belongs to all is palpable. Continue reading →

This interview is part of an ongoing series about open access (OA), publishing, communication, and anthropology.  The first interview in this series was with Jason Baird Jackson (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).  The second interview, with Tom Boellstorff, is here.  The third installment of this OA series is with Keith Hart.*

Ryan Anderson: Thanks for doing this interview, Keith.  Let’s just jump right in here: What do you think about this whole ‘open access’ conversation going on in anthropology?

Keith Hart: Obviously I am in favor of it. The form that the discussion takes in contemporary anthropology seems to be specifically American, where the contradictions of established practice are most acute. In the most general sense, OA is a strategy of resistance to privatization of the commons, any commons. As such it is central to the intellectual property wars. But here I think we are talking about a much narrower issue of how to make research publications freely available without undermining their role as cultural capital in academic career advancement. This reflects the interests of a mass of unemployed young researchers who can’t afford to pay for information and yet still hope to find academic employment some day. The tension is between maintaining the intellectual commons and conserving ideas as private property. The situation is exacerbated in American anthropology by the peculiarly obdurate policy of the professional association (AAA) which elevates a closed regime of private production for profit above sharing knowledge with the general public. I am reminded of Marx’s early journalism against restriction of peasants’ access to fallen wood in the Westphalian forests. Most OA activists can’t fight privatization with his polemical intensity because they have already bought into the premises of an academic career. I met some anthropology friends on Twitter in 2009 who were as agitated then by the AAA’s restrictive (I am inclined to say “insane”) policies as they are now. We formed the Open Anthropology Cooperative–but we will return to that later. I am still struck by the insularity of American anthropologists who rarely consider if the French, for example, have come up with interesting responses to this general problem. Is OA an issue in Brazil or Scandinavia, in Japan or India? American anthropology isn’t the world and I hope that the OAC’s global membership will discuss these questions fruitfully. But then we run up against the limitations of language. Being able to read and write in English is not universal, yet how often is concern with OA extended to the issue of language barriers?

RA: These are some really important points you bring up.  First of all, let’s talk about the idea that American anthropology “isn’t the world,” as you say.  What do you know about some of the OA-related conversations that are taking place in France, Scandinavia, Brazil and elsewhere?  Where can or should we look to connect with those conversations?  Also, why do you think language barriers are so rarely addressed in OA discussions in the US? Continue reading →

This is the last segment of this three part interview with Jason Baird Jackson about anthropology and open access. See Part 1 here, and Part 2, here.

Ryan Anderson: I think this last point you make about the direct role that faculty and graduate students play in all this is really important. We all have choices, and ultimately the publishing and communication system is what we make of it. So, as a last question for you, what advice do you have for people who are interested in these issues but unsure where to start looking for others who share similar concerns, values, and commitments?

Jason Baird Jackson: The open access community is by its very nature, open. In North American and European contexts, finding folks eager to help students and established scholars negotiate these questions is pretty easy. If one is at a university with a research- oriented library, there will be one or more librarians specializing in these issues. Such librarians often lead workshops on such topics as “author’s rights,” “copyright issues for scholars,” and “open access.” Librarians have a strong service ethic and are usually very eager to help scholars get their bearings on these topics. They are SO eager to find faculty allies on these questions. If you give them a moment, they will also passionately explain why OA matters so much to the future of the library and its public service mission.

While research libraries at larger universities are often a center of gravity for information and resources on these topics, librarians at teaching colleges are often just as energized and knowledgeable about these matters because, given their scale and budgets, open access is even more important to them as they seek to serve their campuses. Librarian Barbara Fister at Gustavus Adolphus College is a great example. She writes wonderful columns on these topics for Inside Higher Education and Library Journal. She’s the kind of thinker, activist, and explainer who is very accessible online. I have already mentioned Peter Suber and the explanatory resources that he has assembled with the help of the larger community. Continue reading →

See Part 1 of this interview, here.

Ryan Anderson: So what are the major stumbling blocks holding up a transition to Open Access in your view? What’s keeping most people from making this jump? Lastly, what do you think about the system employed by the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) where authors can post working papers? Can a system like that be a stepping stone to OA?

Jason Baird Jackson: At the author level, one stumbling block is a pervasive lack of basic knowledge about these issues among scholars and policy makers within our field (and in most fields). I am sympathetic to everyone’s plight. It is all very complicated and uncertain therefore doing what we have always done has proven the easiest path. Most of us do not understand copyright or the Creative Commons system. Most of us do not understand journal business models or how it is that librarians have made so much (expensive) information so easily available to those of us with the luxury of university affiliations. In the face of much confusion and anxiety, just sending our manuscripts to the editors and journals that we know in the way that we have always done has seemed sensible and prudent.

Related is the situation in which we perceive that we understand the changing landscape better than we do. A clear instance is when we post the final published versions of our writings online because we wrongly believe ourselves to have the right to do so. The increasing prevalence of such accidental piracy fosters the misunderstanding that such practices are the right way to do open access. Such piracy is counter-productive on many levels and is unnecessary given that there are legal and technically better ways to pursue OA.

Such author-centered issues are the major stumbling block for green OA. The fact that many scholars do not have direct access to a home institutional repository is another factor. I tried to suggest that there are usually workarounds for this in my earlier comments. Your mentioning of the Social Science Research Network represents another possible solution that anthropologists should investigate more actively [see Adam Leeds’ comment about SSRN here on Savage Minds a while back]. I have not yet given it the attention that it deserves as a possible option for anthropologists.

The biggest factor driving green OA are funder and especially institutional OA mandates (touched upon above). Those who are most eager to promote OA in anthropology can work locally to establish mandates in their home institutions. When a university such as Kansas or California or a college such as Oberlin, or when (hypothetically) a research institute, applied anthropology agency or museum, establish a green OA mandate, this has the almost immediate effect of educating the entire research community at such an institution about the issues that we have been talking about, above and beyond the obvious direct benefit of bringing a large portion of that institution’s research output into the OA domain. Such mandates can be established at the school or department level in instances where an institution-wide mandate cannot yet be achieved. The most prominent and persistent advocate for green OA and for green OA mandates is cognitive scientist Steven Harnad, who makes the case consistently and forcefully, on the basis of much evidence, at his website Open Access Archivangelism. Continue reading →

During the last few weeks I had the chance to conduct an email based interview with Jason Baird Jackson about Open Access (OA), academic publishing, and anthropology…

Ryan Anderson: Thanks for doing this interview, Jason. My first question is really basic: What IS open access all about, and how is it any different from standard academic publishing?

Jason Baird Jackson: Its a pleasure to have this chance to talk about open access (hereafter, OA). When I am asked to recommend an explanation of what OA is about, I usually point colleagues to the basic introductory documents assembled by philosopher and OA strategist Peter Suber. His one page “Very Brief Introduction to Open Access” is a great place to start. It begins noting: “Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder.” There is much more that scholarly authors, societies, publishers, and libraries need to know about OA, but this is a good start. The features that Suber notes in this sentence comprise the basic differences that you are searching for.

OA evokes different things for different people and interest groups. I suspect that we will touch on some of the range of concerns that these actors bring to the topic. For a time, it made sense to speak of OA as an alternative to standard academic publishing but I do not think that this framing works any longer. While OA represents a significant set of transformations in what we might think of as the inherited scholarly publishing domain, OA is now at the heart of standard academic publishing. That does not mean that there is agreement about the issues or about emergent practices or even about the definition of basic terms. My “its all one system now” view just acknowledges such facts on the ground as the reality that we now have academic authors publishing in “gold OA” journals without even realizing that such a nameable kind of publication exists as such. On the other side of the ledger, the largest commercial publishers are fully, if sometimes begrudgingly, involved in open access through their having acceded to public, university, and funder demands for what is called “green OA” and via their author-pays approaches to gold and “hybrid” OA”. (We’ll touch on these modes, perhaps.) While people like me tend to talk about OA as a means towards a dramatic transformation of scholarly communication, one aimed at making it more sustainable, accountable, ethical, public, etc., commercial publishers increasingly describe OA as just another business model. We are debating and rebuilding the same publishing system even if, at times, and in some senses, it seems like OA advocates are creating an alternative infrastructure for the discovery, circulation, evaluation, and reuse of scholarly research outputs.

It can be treated as a different topic, one that we need only acknowledge and not discuss, but I just used the terribly clumsy phrase “research outputs” as a way of highlighting the parallel transformations that we are experiencing in the system of scholarly genres. Running alongside the OA transformation, the canonical genres—journal article and scholarly book—are being remixed and destabilized in countless ways. For anthropology, these generic changes are different from those that followed the field’s “writing culture” debates. Earlier, we wondered what we could say in a book. Now we wonder what a book is. In your own corner of the new territory, I could ask: Is your anthropologies project a journal, a scholarly website, a weblog? Do your authors know? Such questions are increasingly present and point to what a time of experimentation we are in. OA advocates in anthropology have been particularly attentive to this related-but-not-the-same issue of genre. That said, the core of the OA discussion has been the journal article as we’ve known it and few would deny its continued centrality as the currency of the academic realm. Continue reading →