Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World seems to me the most influential book to have gone through the awards process at #aaa2016 this year. Not only did it win the Bateson and Turner prizes, it was  a nonfiction pick from Kirkus, and also got nods from Flavorwire, Times Higher Education, and the Northern California Book Reviewers. It might be argued that these successes come from the book’s release date, which allowed it to be reviewed in 2015 and 2016. It could also be that in this era of presidential politics predicted by Douglas Adams in The Restaurant at the End of the World the book seems particularly salient. But honestly: given the book’s prominence in the intellectual life of the discipline — by which I mean the social media I read — it’s hard for me at least to think of any other book of 2016 that had the immediate impact of Mushroom. 

When we look back at the history of the discipline, Mushroom will epitomize much of our current moment: The Haraway-inflected, Kirksey-aligned focus on multi species entanglement. The Butlerian focus on precarity. The Biehl and Cohn-esque stark black and white photos of people staring out of frame. And of course the funny, touching, humble, defiant, insightful writing. Even those of us who have issues with the book (like me) ca’t deny that this book is about where the discipline is now?

But if The Mushroom Book is the epitome of the year of the monkey, will it still be relevant to the year of the rooster? Mushroom is written from a place of curiosity about our current dilemma by someone alarmed by our present condition but, to be frank, not immediately imperiled by it. I suspect that this affluent, puzzled subject position is one of the reasons the book so successfully reached the liberal middle brow Kirkus crowd.

But has Donald Trump killed Anna Tsing? That is to say, could our situation be so dire now that the anthropology of the future will find quizzical enquiries into the Matsuka diaspora luxuriously irrelevant? Could it be that ten years from now — as an ocean of adjuncts scramble to sign the loyalty oaths necessary to teach a few courses at the University of Phoenix in locations both free of radiation and above water — we may look back on Mushroom as the last beautiful flower opened in the long, late afternoon of our discipline’s descent into night.

I hope not. But I can’t help feeling that anthropology (especially in the US) will move to an angrier, less experimental place. Didn’t a similar shift occur after 9/11, when we moved from an Appaduraian wonder at frictionless global flows to a more disillusioned focus on power, the state, and governance? Of course, in every age there is always someone studying some approach or other. But collectively, and in a general way, I do feel the discipline changes focus as it calibrates to its broader context. It might be that in the year of the rooster anthropology’s center of gravity shifts away from the mushroom.

Back in May, fellow Savage Mind Chris Kelty wrote a post about Elsevier’s purchase of SSRN (aka the Social Science Research Network). The short version of the story is that this purchase is Not Good News, although some folks think it’s Worse News than others. Kelty’s primary argument was that SSRN users needn’t worry so much about their papers, and that DATA was the actual issue. Data, he wrote, is the real reason why Elsevier was attracted to the idea of getting their hands on the SSRN. This data is valuable, Kelty writes, because:

…it is “open access” and because it collects an impressively diverse range of social science in one place, SSRN’s data actually represents the world of social science scholarship reasonably well. There are lots of social scientists who don’t use it—none of my friends in sociology or anthropology do, for instance. Remember though: All models are wrong, but some are useful. SSRN represents better data about the impact of social science research than any single journal, or any publisher’s data (even Elsevier, with its hundreds of social science journals), because it has been built on the good will, apparent neutrality, and level playing field of an open access repository. Until Tuesday May 17, it was not tied to any particular publishing conglomerate or metrics company, and so its data represented social science research with a fidelity to reality that is expensive and hard to otherwise achieve–the result of the hard work of Gregg Gordon, his staff, and advisers to be sure.

Why is this valuable to Elsevier? Because it’s valuable to academics. Like the Impact Factor, which is also owned by a for-profit high-margin company—Thomson Reuters—SSRN is a valuable input in the bureaucracy of academic personnel. Academic administrators long ago gave up evaluating scholars based on quality or innovative research, and turned to evaluating “impact” instead. And impact is a sort of metaphysical quality that is not in the research itself, but in the circulation and reception of research—it can only be captured by metrics, which requires collecting data. The reason is obvious to anyone who works in the university: impact = higher rankings, higher rankings = more and better students, more donors, more reputation for the institution… all of which translates into the ability to hire more high impact researchers. If that kind of data is valuable to academic administrators, Elsevier is right to focus on collecting more if it, monetizing it, and selling it back to Universities. After all, the model of taking all the labor of academics, packaging it up and then selling it back to Universities and academics has worked really really well for them in the past.

I think Kelty is right to point out that the papers in the archive were not the big draw, and that SSRN users didn’t really have much to worry about on that front. As he pointed out, “The papers in SSRN have no economic value,” and “Elsevier can’t really claim ownership over them unless they were subsequently published in an Elsevier journal.”

For me data is part of the problem, indeed. But another part of the problem is that Elsevier was able to purchase SSRN in the first place. What I find most problematic is the idea that users join together to create a shared network and repository…and then lost control of it. This is something, in my opinion, that we have to guard against if we’re going to start building alternative publishing and storage platforms. I see similar problems with users sharing papers (and producing data for potential purchase/harvesting) on sites like Facebook and Academia.edu. We need other alternatives–alternatives that can’t simply be bought out from under us (or, like Academia.edu, increasingly walled off via extra services that require membership “upgrades,” which means paying more and more $$$).

Kelty mentioned one alternative in his post: “Some people are suggesting that it is time for a alternative, such as an ArXiv for social science research. All these things are good food for thought.” I loved the idea, and went on twitter and said so:

ArXiv for social science research anyone? @savageminds @culanth @haujournal @jmtrombley @jasonjackson2 @daniel_lende @MattThompsonTMM

— ryan anderson (@anthropologia) May 19, 2016

…which then prompted Matt Thompson to write a post called “What is arXiv and how can we get one,” which I highly recommend, especially if you have no idea about digital repositories, Green Open Access…and what on earth “arXiv” is in the first place. In short:

Like SSRN, arXiv is a digital repository. They are both examples of Green OA — a type of open access where authors deposit versions of their work so that they can be accessed by readers for free. What version of an article makes it into the repository depends on which publisher you’re working with, but almost all of them allow authors to deposit the original submission: no peer review, no mark-up, no type setting. Others are more generous, a few even allow the post-print to be deposited. It just depends, if you want to go Green do some research on your publisher’s homepage or ask a company rep.

Green OA is frequently contrasted with Gold OA, where the author submits to a journal that makes the final product available to readers for free, examples include HAU and Cultural Anthropology. Again, there is great diversity among Gold OA publishers just as there is among Green repositories but we’re not getting into that here.

For those of you who have been waiting, here’s the part where I get to the point. A couple of weeks ago a saw some twitter activity from the recent American Sociological Association meeting. There was something called @SocArXiv making a lot of good noise about publishing and open access. Good noise like this:

#ASA16: long ago, people used to trade biz cards & say “send me your paper.” Now we do this https://t.co/YcqRfEZJrv pic.twitter.com/UfsUqWCbX1

— SocArXiv (@socarxiv) August 20, 2016

Elsevier is playing the long game. We need to also, by building alternatives https://t.co/HJn5cEQsxu

— SocArXiv (@socarxiv) September 1, 2016

Ok sociologists: you’re back from #asa16 and now your paper is just sitting there. Time for SocArXiv! https://t.co/W8C7FWd01l via @socarxiv

— SocArXiv (@socarxiv) August 29, 2016

…and my favorite straight-to-the-point-open-access-message of the month:

Many academics agonize about making their work stylistically “accessible”. Just try for literally accessible. https://t.co/V063qG05Zc

— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) August 19, 2016

Literally accessible! Brilliant! Well, that’s what something like a Green Open Access digital repository can be part of: creating a network of open access scholarship that makes our work available to wider audiences (not just “the public,” but also anyone who happens to find themselves on the outside of academia). SocArXiv is an archive for all of the social scientists, and our sociological cousins are jumping on board. So what it is? It’s an offshoot of the main arXiv idea (ie what Matt wrote about in his post), and currently in development. There’s a temporary version online now, hosted via the Open Science Framework, but the full site should be live by the end of the year.

So what about us anthropologists? I’m hoping we can get in on this too–and #AAA2016 opwould be a good place to start. I got in touch with some of the folks from @SocArXiv and asked them about the possibility of putting something together for the upcoming conference. They’re game. Are we? Are you? I am. It’s time for Open Access to Strike Back in 2016. Let me know what you think in the comments, or via Twitter: @anthropologia

ArXiv for social science research anyone? @savageminds @culanth @haujournal @jmtrombley @jasonjackson2 @daniel_lende @MattThompsonTMM

— ryan anderson (@anthropologia) May 19, 2016

This is a pretty interesting idea. What would it entail taking arXiv as a role model?

What is arXiv?

Like SSRN, arXiv is a digital repository. They are both examples of Green OA — a type of open access where authors deposit versions of their work so that they can be accessed by readers for free. What version of an article makes it into the repository depends on which publisher you’re working with, but almost all of them allow authors to deposit the original submission: no peer review, no mark-up, no type setting. Others are more generous, a few even allow the post-print to be deposited. It just depends, if you want to go Green do some research on your publisher’s homepage or ask a company rep.

Green OA is frequently contrasted with Gold OA, where the author submits to a journal that makes the final product available to readers for free, examples include HAU and Cultural Anthropology. Again, there is great diversity among Gold OA publishers just as there is among Green repositories but we’re not getting into that here.

arXiv is Green OA, it is a pre-print repository but of a particular kind. If you’re at an elite or second tier R1 you probably already have access to a repository through your institution. However many of these institutional repositories (IRs) share a common problem, faculty participation is low. Some universities have attempted to address this with OA mandates, but this is not always sufficient to change faculty behavior. People are really busy, or maybe they don’t see the value in access. Perhaps they think someone else will do it for them, or are mistaken about their author’s rights. For whatever reason many people who can go Green choose not to.

The generally poor showings for institutional repositories has lead some in the digital libraries field to argue that IRs are not the way forward for Green OA. Instead they anticipate that disciplinary repositories (DRs), sometimes called subject repositories, will be more successful. Perhaps in our neoliberal world faculty are less tied to their institution than their discipline? Both SSRN and arXiv are DRs.

nb. There are other ways you can get your pre-prints out there without a repository. Social networks like academia.edu and researchgate.net exist to facilitate self-promotion and the sharing of information. Similarly with personal webpages. However, a major advantage to IRs and DRs over social networks and personal webpages is that the former are run by information professionals. Digital librarians who will work to insure that your metadata meet international standards and that technical stuff, like bit stream preservation, are well maintained thus keeping your work discoverable and accessible. To get the best of both worlds deposit your work in a repository, this will result in a URL that you can embed on your webpage or network.

So both SSRN and arXiv are Green OA, disciplinary repositories run by full-time professionals. But there’s a difference!

What makes arXiv special?

Three things make arXiv magic. It carries prestige among the community it is intended to serve, it has a very successful business plan, and it has a very successful governance model. All of this was achieved with only twenty-five years of hard work and sacrifice.

On its front page arXiv boasts 1,148,725 e-prints available for download, better than double SSRN’s 563,300. This is pretty remarkable when you consider that arXiv was originally intended as a repository just for physicists (today it has slightly expanded that scope) whereas SSRN aims to serve all of the social sciences and the humanities.

For some reason physicists have really bought into what arXiv has to offer. Maybe it is a result of the collaborative atmosphere of physics research? In my imagination, cultural anthropology romanticizes the lone genius — we’re either collecting ethnographic data in some out of the way place isolated from the rest of the world or perhaps cloistered in an solitary office channeling that experience into text only to emerge with the finished product. Maybe we just don’t do enough stuff as part of a team?

Aside: I think an integral part of the professional life of someone in the social sciences or humanities is the experience of being in a constant state of precarity. Not only do our colleagues in the STEM fields have more resources at their disposal, they are not constantly called upon to defend their very existence to powerful outsiders. Shoestring budgets and the unending barrage of existential threats make a lot of social science and humanities faculty “small-c conservative,” risk averse and skeptical about diverging from the well-worn path of professional success offered by conventional publications.

All of this is to say, there seems to be something about the “culture” of physicists that contributes to their high participation rate. If I was a physicist and I deposited an e-print in arXiv I could tell my buddies and everyone would pat me on the back. Good job! Another publication! If as an anthropologist I make a deposit to SSRN and I tell my buddies about it, everyone would say, What’s SSRN? and, When are you going to publish that? Raising the prestige and visibility of Green OA is one of the best possible outcomes of the SSRN/Elsevier merger. But more on that later

One more detail: arXiv does not rely on peer review. Instead, there is a system of vetting author submissions. Like peer reviewers, experts volunteer to vet submissions but instead of writing comments they are primarily interested in making sure that papers are acceptable and properly sorted into their appropriate sub-field. Many arXiv papers go on to have other lives as traditional publications and thus go through a peer review process eventually. My point here is that physicists think sharing unreviewed work is a notable accomplishment in a way that anthropologists (currently) do not.

The business plan for arXiv is perhaps the most crucial ingredient to its success. Born in the Los Alamos Laboratories in 1991, arXiv has since migrated with its founder Paul Ginsparg to Cornell. Cornell University Libraries, known as a leader even among the most elite libraries, has since 2011 provided the repository with infrastructural support and staffing. Annual funding from CUL is supplemented with the deep pockets of the Simons Foundation, both in the form of annual funding and challenge grants. Further contributing to this are voluntary pledges from about 200 institutions that represent arXiv’s heaviest users, these pledges range $1500-3000 per institution per year. The above are 2012 numbers.

Oya Yildirim Rieger writes in “Sustainability: Scholarly Repository as Enterprise” (Bulletin for the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol.39, No.1) that there are five sustainability principles CUL adheres to in planning the future of arXiv: (1) deep integration into the scholarly community and scholarly process — scientists take a leadership role in guiding arXiv, it reflects their values and their community as a result; (2) a clearly defined mandate and governance structure — if you’re running a digital archive then you’re playing a long game. The long game is the whole point of archiving things!; (3) technology platform stability and innovation — the data architecture and user interface game has to be top notch and always responsive to the constantly changing expectations of the users; (4) systematic development of content policies — be crystal clear about collection policies, submission guidelines, copyright status, etc.; (5) reliance on business planning strategies — you want big money for your repository? Then you better be able to talk the business talk and show value to your investors.

The long term viability of arXiv is sustained by its thoughtful governance structure. CUL upholds its end of the bargain from a managerial and administrative standpoint, they house the archive. But they are in constant communication with two boards: a Member Advisory Board, consisting of elected representatives from stakeholder institutions, and a Scientific Advisory Board that consists of researchers in the fields arXiv serves. These two boards are responsible for providing input on different aspects of arXiv’s development. The MAB is more concerned with implementing information standards, working towards interoperability, and planning. The SAB is concerned with intellectual oversight and the vetting process.

What about the future of SSRN?

As you can see arXiv has a lot to recommend it and achieving these goals will be a tall order. In the meantime, we already have the SSRN plus all manner of other institutional repositories and digital libraries. So, do we really need something like arXiv instead?

To be sure Elsevier’s acquisition of SSRN is disappointing to many open access activists because it represents another step towards the corporate enclosure of intellectual life. Elsevier is perceived by many as among the worst of the bunch because of its reputation for playing hardball, being litigious, gobbling up author’s rights, and even on a few occasions acquiring OA journals and then charging for access to them. What a bully!

Elsevier has also been the focus of past and ongoing boycotts with scholars refusing to cite their journals, submit work, or volunteer as reviewers or editors. No doubt some authors will feel that they should abstain from participating in SSRN as an extension of their OA activism. If this sounds like you, then you will no doubt be in good company. There are lots of other ways you can go Green OA. Vote with your feet and choose one of those instead.

I’m actually going to run the other way with this. I am not going to advocate for the boycotting of SSRN and this is why: open access is not free.

arXiv solved the problem of funding open access by aligning itself with an Ivy League school and the philanthropic arm of a crazy rich hedge fund manager. Plus it still manages to get hundreds of other libraries to send it checks on an annual basis, NPR-style. SSRN saw another way forward, selling out to corporate America. Did the professional staff at SSRN all get big bonuses and golden parachutes as a result? Probably not. They do, however, get to have salaries and benefits which is pretty cool considering they give their product away for free. They, SSRN, had reached the limit of their growth as an independent entity and needed more resources to advance their goal. Ckelty is probably right that Elsevier sees this as an opportunity to feast upon data, but if the service remains free to use while increasing in quality then that might be an acceptable trade off. As we have known since Darwin, trade offs are an integral part of distributing risk through populations living in complex ecosystems.

I suspect that some will not be persuaded. Contributing to an Elsevier property will be an ideological bridge too far and, to be honest, I am sympathetic with this position. An arXiv for the social sciences holds a lot of promise — but here’s the rub. Even if you had arXiv’s mad funding and governance skillz, you would still be missing a key ingredient: acceptance and prestige among the community the archive intends to serve. The physics community has embraced arXiv and Green OA in a way that anthropology and the social sciences has not. That’s on us.

So maybe we don’t need to replicate arXiv. Maybe we need to have a period of reflection, reflexivity in that classic ANTH 101 sense, about our “culture” as a discipline. Then conceptualize a repository that reflects that in a way that other anthropologists will think is valuable. That might result in something that is not identical to arXiv, but uniquely our own.

But the mad dough and Ivy library would probably be pretty helpful too.

During her time at the AAA Schmid had the unenviable job being the person in charge of saying ‘no’ to open access advocates who sought to change the AAAs publishing strategy. This wasn’t because she was a mean-hearted person, but rather because she became the face of an institution that was unable to live up to its values of openness and freedom of information because  those values were in conflict with the association’s interests — especially its need to make money through the sale of its publications.

To be sure, Schmid developed a number of new programs during her time at AAA, including several open access initiatives like Anthropology Book Forum and the AAA’s faux-open access journal Open Anthropology. But during Schmid’s tenure the organization was never able to overcome the fundamental institutional imperatives that drew it closer and closer to closed access publishers like Wiley Blackwell.

Although I didn’t have much direct contact with Schmid over the years, I did feel that she was genuinely committed to open access for many reasons, including the fact that it is what most AAA members want. It was probably impossible for her to perform a revolution inside the AAA, and I have no doubt that she did the best she could with the hand she was dealt. Nevertheless, it was during her tenure we saw the rise of open access projects like HAU and Cultural Anthropology, both of which demonstrated that that open access was a space in which anthropology could feasibly innovate.

Schmid’s departure also highlights one of the fundamental dynamics of scholarly societies: Our members have made a commitment to our role which is more than just a career choice. It’s a vocation, a lifelong commitment to scholarship, and to furthering the institutions which promote scholarship. Tenured professors dedicate tremendous amount of time to service work, while members of the precariate rightfully demand a place at the table, and a commitment from their institutions that they will have enough job security to fritter away their free time on peer review and curriculum committees.

Association employees, on the other hand, do not have this deep, values-driven commitment to their calling. Frankly, they may be on to something since being a professor is sort of ridiculous and exhausting. But it does mean that we tend to stick around long after our employees have moved on to another job. How many times have I had editors of Anthropology News tell me it was their journal and not mine, and I had to rewrite my piece to suit them, etc. etc. only to have them leave a few years later? Of course, the flip side of this is that people like Schmid take jobs were entrenched cliques of obsessive freaks argue endlessly over a small set of unresolvable issues, and then kvetch endlessly when you end up being yet one more person who can’t resolve them.

So I thank Schmid for her hard work and patience with the AAA for the last eight years and wish her well working with the psychologists. But at the end of the day, even as we thank Schmid for her service we, the members of the association, remain in place, advocating that the AAA act in accordance with its values as it seeks to fulfill its mission as a scholarly association. We are not just the institutional memory of the association, we are the association in a way that much of the staff is not. What can I say? It’s a blessing and a curse. So farewell Oona Schmid, and I hope that psychologists treat you well. Good luck in your new endeavors!

The basic idea is this: We have long known that the American Anthropological Association is unable and/or unwilling to innovate on its own. Most of the developments in open access anthropology have happened outside of the AAAs structure. Sure, the AAA has tried various things such as a faux-open access journal and open access book reviews. But its core business model has been to throw in its lot with a large corporate publisher.

Our recent proposal to the AAA marks an important watershed in open access anthropology because it represents something new. Now, open access is not only growing outside of the AAA’s auspices, it is actually feeding back into the AAA itself. Instead of just going its own way, the open access community is now saying to the AAA: “You can’t develop a robust open access business model on your own. But what if we developed one for you? What if we could prove to you that there is a financially sustainable way for you to run your publishing unit? If we build it, will you come?”

My guess is that, no, the AAA will not endorse the model. The AAA has published American Anthropologist for over a hundred years, and their fundamental goal is to make sure that it continues for another hundred years. In the past couple of years the AAA has done a good job of building capacity, but it is still a conservative institution which is very risk averse.

But we can hope. And hopefully the cooperative proposal we have set out will receive lots of pushback from the AAA and people in the publishing industry to tell us that It Cannot Be Done, You Don’t Understand The Numbers, and so forth. This will only lead us to sharpen our argument, gather more data, and make an even stronger case. And — if you don’t mind my saying so — I think the open access movement deserves a lot of kudos of continuing to press its case with an institution that it very easily could have walked away from. In the end, the only way to test the business model is to actually try it, and I hope that someday we can prove to the AAA that our proposals are indeed feasible. If we do not, it will not be for lack of trying on our part.

One day at work I decided to abstain from my usual time wasting behaviors of Facebook and reading the comments section of the Washington Post, and instead invest my downtime in reading the Naledi piece. Look at me! I’m reading an article for fun! Truly this is one of the most liberating experiences of being outside the academy: now I read scholarship for pleasure.

I was proud of myself for making it all the way to the end, feeling like I got it. Okay, so I skimmed over some of the anatomy stuff, but not all of it. Nothing I can’t handle with a dictionary nearby. With no one to impress with my studiousness except my fellow librarians (who are all, of course, very studious), I looked forward to sharing a bottle of wine with my wife (a biologist and “real” scientist) and telling her all about the findings. We frequently have animated discussions about human evolution, so it came as a surprise when she didn’t want to talk about Homo Naledi rather what grabbed her attention first was that the authors had chosen to go OA.

Jessica has established herself an open access skeptic in our previous kitchen conversations, which unfolded something like…

Her: So where did they publish? Didn’t you say it was the cover of Nature?

Me: No. Cover of National Geographic. Lee Berger had a NGS Explorer grant.

Her: Where then? Science?

Me: No, they went open access. Something called eLife.

Her: Really?! Wow. But why? *gives side eye*

Me: I don’t know if they’ve stated a reason.

Her: Faster to press maybe? That is one thing that the open access journals have over traditional venues.

Me: IDK, but I think it shows how OA is really mainstreaming in anthropology.

Her: Who makes that call? Like, do you think the post-docs and assistant professors on that pub were like, “Hey man, this could be the cover of Science. This could be Nature.”

Me: IDK. Do you think if you’re the sixth or seventh author on the discovery of the decade it really matters? You’re on the discovery of the decade!

Her: Maybe… But then getting on those pubs is how people get jobs. it could make a difference in whether or not someone gets tenure. Some administrator could be like, “Eh, I’ve never heard of eLife” and you get denied.

Me: But how often does that really happen? People getting denied tenure by administrators once they get past their departments.

Her: It happens all the time. Every year. All the denials (at her uni) come from administrators because everyone gets past their departments.

Me: But do people get denied tenure because of which venue they choose to publish in, or because of some bizarre, internecine political struggle?

Her: Probably more likely the latter.

Me: You are correct that accumulating the right kind of publications is all about economies of prestige, but that’s an artifact of academic culture. And culture being learned behavior is something we can change. That’s why they say “Only the Senior Faculty Can Save Us Now”. We need the senior faculty to publish OA, bringing their prestige with them to burnish these new titles to get people to change their attitudes.

Her: *looks skeptical*

-=-

The following day I’m back at work, checking out what’s on tap over at my favorite NPR talk show when lo and behold its blogger extraordinaire and Fedora model John Hawks (who is also known in some circles as being pretty good at this anthropology thing) with several of his colleagues talking about Naledi. I start thinking that what I need to do is call in to the radio show and pitch him an open access question so he can knock it out of the park.

@drshow For the study authors, you could have had a cover at Nature or Science, why did you choose an online open access journal to publish?

— Matt Thompson (@M4ttTh0mps0n) September 14, 2015

Much to my delight (and to the surprise of my co-workers as I started pumping my fists in the air) the host read my tweet.

John, who was on the phone from South Africa, had to go before the host read my question (which came second-to-last in the show), but as Jamie Shreeve, who wrote the National Geographic cover story, made clear time to publication was a major factor in the decision to go with an open access publisher. The authors did have Nature in mind. But the scale of the study, which included some 1,500 individual fossils, contributed to the complexity of navigating traditional scholarly communication venues.

h/t to the Wife, for getting it right.

-=-

One final note. As one who uses an information science framework to research open access I am often struck with how OA activists will sometimes claim that once the toll-gates come down that, naturally, articles will reach wider audiences and receive more citations. Seldom is this demonstrated empirically, which is a shame because it would be easy to do. Take something like Cultural Anthropology which was formerly toll-gated and is now OA. How did the downloads circulate before and how do they circulate now? What were citation rates like previously, what are they like now? Let’s do some good ol’ Compare and Contrast.

What is more typical is for OA advocates to merely make the assertion and not back-up their statements, and I think: If I an anthropologist was making a knowledge claim like this in their own area of expertise, this would never fly.

Almost 160000 page views &16000 downloads of our article in @eLife. Very proud of #openaccess science #homonaledi http://t.co/cl4UhLeGx5

— Lee Berger (@LeeRberger) September 15, 2015

So its cool to see Lee Berger tweeting about the success of his team’s decision to go OA with numbers to back it up. You catch a scent of the enthusiasm and excitement, which probably motivated this tweet more so than a desire to satisfy LIS bean-counters like myself, and its hard not to get wrapped in the moment too.

This is indeed a proud moment for open access science. Here’s to many more!

In the end, the intel turned out to be incorrect and we all let out a collective sigh of status-quo-preserving relief. For a minute there we thought we might have to get all up in arms and start checking the oil in our X-Wing fighters and such to fight the big Open Access battle of the century. No need. Stand down folks, stand down.

But the false alarm got me thinking of the time that Elsevier issued more than 2,000 take-down notices to authors who had illegally posted articles on Academia.edu. This was back in 2013. Remember that? You might not. But. It. happened. That was the time that a bunch of scholars get all bent out of shape at the Big Evil Publisher that had committed the dastardly act of exercising its legal rights! The nerve! The gall! What right does that Big Evil Publisher have over work that authors freely and willingly gave away via signed author agreements? I mean, seriously, what those publishers are doing is an outrage. Right? Who has the time to read the author agreements? Is there even any text on those agreements? Who reads any fine print these days?

Here’s what Barbara Fister had to say about the whole Elsevier fiasco:

HAHAHAHAHahahahahah . . . whew, that was funny. (Wipes away tears of laughter and frustration.) Those chickens finally came home to roost. All these years librarians have been saying to scholars, “uh, you realize what happens when you sign away your rights, don’t you? You just gave your copyright to a corporation. We have pay them to get access to that content, and anyone who can’t pay can’t read it. Is this really what you had in mind when you wrote up that research?

As Fister explains in her post, the usual response she gets when she tries to bring up these issues is something along the lines of: “ZZZZZZzzzzzzzzz snort, snuffle. Huh? Did you say something? Oh, yeah, tenure. Promotion. Don’t be silly. I’m working on a review article, can you get these articles for me?” But when people get take-down notices, suddenly they wake up and get outraged about their articles and their rights. Here’s her response:

While in a way I find this outrage a little funny, I can’t indulge in “I told you so.” This episode once again shows that librarians are not the change agents we want to see. We can’t get scholarly authors attention quite the way a publisher can when it actually uses the all-rights-reserved copyright that authors have willingly given them.

Fister’s post ends with some suggestions: read some Peter Suber. Take some time to learn a bit more about the rights journals are asking for, and the kinds of waivers you can request that help you retain more of your rights. Browse the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). She lists a few more suggestions as well. The main problem persists though. Despite the options that exist, many scholars keep doing the same old thing and signing away the rights to their work. Sure, the Elsevier take-down created a stir…but it was short-lived. Now most of us are back to the grind–publishing and signing away our rights faster than you can say “Hey what the hell are those folks at Cultural Anthropology talking about with all of this ‘publishing otherwise’ business?”

Rex here at Savage Minds also wrote about the big Elsevier shocker:

When you publish with Elsevier, you sign an agreement with them called a ‘copyright transfer agreement’. Guess what it does? That’s right: It transfers control of your creative work to them. In many important ways, your work no longer belongs to you. You may be the author, but you are no longer the owner.

Rex wrote that “Elsevier and other publishers have quietly tolerated the tremendous traffic of PDFs that happens both in public and private on the Internet.” They do this because it’s in their best interest, as Rex explained: “if most people realized the way they had signed away their rights to publishers, the open access movement would double or triple in size overnight.”

Did you see that? Let’s recap: If most people realized the way they had signed away their rights to publishers, the open access movement would double or triple in size overnight.

This mass realization obviously hasn’t happened yet. And so the screwed up world of corporate academic publishing keeps grinding forward. The worst part, as Rex points out, is that so many of us are surprised–if not shocked–when publishers actually do what they told us they were going to do in the first place. This, he says, is like being upset at Jaws for eating people in questionably accurate 1970s films. Of course the shark is eating people! It’s the 1970s! And, duh, look at the poster for the film! Likewise, of course the massive corporate publisher is gobbling up and controlling all of our academic output! We went swimming in their ocean, after all.

Like Fister, Rex has some advice to help soothe our wounded souls. There are ways to make the world of scholarly communication a better place. Publish in gold OA journals. Publish in green OA journals. Alter the terms of your author’s agreement. He ends with this:

But there’s one thing I don’t think it is fair for us to do: complain about the way the world is because we lived under the impression that it was something else. Especially if we are actively engaged in reproducing it. So if you are pissed off about the Elsevier takedowns, then please join our rebel alliance now — because guess what? Darth Vader actually is out to get you.

Jason B Jackson made a similar argument at the time:

While I am a Elsevier boycott participant and cannot ever imagine publishing with them, I 100% support the rights of Elsevier and other publishers to fully and legally exercise the copyright that they legally hold and to protect their property from illegal misuse by third party firms and from their author agreement-disregarding authors who mistakenly believe that because their name is on the byline of an article that they can do whatever they wish with value-added property that, despite their authorship, they do not own.

Self-piracy is wrong and it is not helping build a better scholarly communication system. Instead, it further confuses the already confused into believing that [pseudo] open access is easy and it leads to painful ironies such as scholarly society leaders setting publishing policies that they do not understand and that they, even as they make them, are out of compliance with.

Jackson’s final argument is that breaking contracts we signed by essentially stealing articles and posting them on for-profit sites “is not the way to do it.” There are other options. Plenty, he reminds us. He also says that it is our obligation as scholars to know how to modify author agreements. This is one step in moving things forward (and something that has been suggested by all three authors I have cited so far–probably good reason to pay attention).

Gavia Libraria also chimed in on the matter right around the same time. For her, much of it comes down to mass ignorance of the issues:

The great mass of those who publish in the scholarly literature are pig-ignorant about how scholarly publishing works. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t have to worry about scam open-access journals or journal impact factor, just to offer up two obvious examples, because they would be laughed out of existence.

This mass of people, she says, has an unwarranted sense of entitlement to the scholarly literature and a warped understanding of their own contributions to it. This entitlement, combined with ignorance, works to the benefit of toll-access publishers. How? Because, she argues, people who feel this sense of entitlement yet know almost nothing about the workings of the publishing world are”are easily manipulated into signing contracts they shouldn’t and vehemently defending organizations and processes out to exploit them.”

These are some harsh words. They might hurt–but that’s probably because they’re right on the mark. I’m definitely someone who has been guilty of complaining about Big Evil Publishers in the past–without looking deeper into the issues. This kind of populism is fun and all, but there’s no actual end game. If the goal is to do something about the current publishing regime, then the first thing we’re going to have to do is wise up. Read up. Learn more and listen more when it comes to publishing.

And here I’m not just talking about the usual conversations about publishing–you know, the ones where people tell you to either get yourself published in the usual toll-access journals or watch your career slowly wither away. I’m talking about the kind of “publishing otherwise” that Marcel LaFlamme writes about (not one, but two nods there folks). The kind of rowdy, alternative publishing that Eileen Joy writes about. And after we educate ourselves, well, it’s time to actively take part in building the alternative publishing platforms that will make the current world of pay-walled publishing seem ridiculous, laughable, and, probably most important, completely inept.

Maybe now is actually the time for the big Open Access battle of the century. If not now, when?

*We don’t actually have an editorial office.

We take great pride in our finished products. Peer reviewed publications are still the coin of the realm. Our attitudes towards data in cultural anthropology are less clear. Are our data worth saving? What have you done with your data? How would you feel about sharing your data with others?

For Harvard political science professor Gary King there is a problem with data in scholarship, generally. The data used to produce most published works usually are not publicly available. Typically it’s sitting on the researcher’s hard drive and only he or she has access to it. That might sound like normal behavior to you, but keep in mind that hard drives are fragile things. For the purpose of this report I went in search of my dissertation data and found it on an old PC in the attic…

In cultural anthropology, a discipline where so much of the self is invested and sacrificed in the work of collecting data I intuit that many of my colleagues would be very reluctant to share their raw materials. They are private for many reasons. Perhaps we see them as full of mistakes and prejudices. Perhaps they include confidential information. Perhaps they are embarrassing as that unfinished novel in your top desk drawer. We don’t write fieldnotes for an audience!

After all, what would you have to gain from open data? At least with a publication you might burnish your reputation by earning a citation in the works of others. If someone ever did use our data, we’d want to get credit for it. But mostly we want to be in control of our data and say what parts, if any, will be seen by others.

At first face this might seem like a problem primarily for the hard sciences. All those tables and graphs, they’re based on something. But once they’re published you can’t pop open the hood and see what’s making them run. Tables and graphs are just images, they’re not interactive (yet). Shouldn’t readers be able to check if an author’s data match their claims? That’s just good empiricism.

Okay, similar problem in cultural anthropology. You read an article and the author inserts a quote from an informant or maybe muses on an observation. But what was the broader context? What came before or after? Maybe its irrelevant. The point is you can’t go back and check, unless you’re an expert in the same field site and know the same locals you won’t have access to that information. What if you could? Where could anthropology take us next if ethnographers produced not just finished products but also datasets that could be mined by new eyes, trained with a different focus to pick out details for another agenda.

We may have to tackle this problem sooner than you think. NSF, NIH, and many others are requiring that funding recipients implement a plan for data archiving, even making their data publicly available. Fortunately there is a cheap and easy way to do this.

Enter Dataverse

Dataverse is an open source, online repository for data. It’s free to use and very user friendly, signing up is about as complicated as Gmail. Dataverse is for creators. It allows authors to control which data audiences are allowed to view, it preserves data files into the future, and generates citations for datasets. Dataverse is for readers too. It documents changes in data over time, allows audiences to check to see the data behind the claims, and allows an author to publicly distribute data without readers having to check for permission. Plus there’s a nice GUI to simplify interaction with the digital archive.

EXAMPLE 1: Using Dataverse at the end of a study.
For existing publications archiving your raw data is as simple as signing up for an account and uploading your files. This will preserve your files in a digital repository, making it easy to return to them for composing future publications. If you want to make parts of your dataset available to others you can do that, or you can keep it private. Recently Dataverse has created a plugin that integrates with OJS (Open Journal Systems), the publishing platform behind many of the best open access publications, allowing authors to submit their data for archiving alongside the article submission.

Some real world examples:

• Journal of Open Archaeology Data
• UBC Laboratory of Archaeology

EXAMPLE 2: Using Dataverse from the beginning of a study.
The best way to insure that your data is ready for long-term preservation is to plan for it from the start. Create a Dataverse account at the beginning of your research project and build the data archive as each stage of the project is completed. This is better than the cloud because files are enriched with metadata which allows for faceted searching. You can choose to release all or part of the study whenever you are ready. Also, if you are working as part of a research team you can use Dataverse as a platform to share data files with authorized team members while still excluding the general public.

Techy stuff

Where are my bits? Your bits are housed in a Dataverse Network and there are many preexisting networks for you to choose from including Harvard University and the University of North Carolina Odum Institute. When you create an account with one of these institutions your files are going to live on their servers. Yes, you can create your own Dataverse Network on your own server. It is open source software, all you have to do is have the technical expertise to install it and the resources to pay for server space and you can have your own Network.

Most users are going to be satisfied with having a Dataverse on someone else’s Dataverse Network. Once you have your account set up you begin by creating a Study. Studies are composed of data files and their associated metadata. You can easily sort your files and describe them to your heart’s content. Collections can be formed out of groups of Studies.

Still sound crazy? If you’re at an elite R1 you might already have a full time “data archivist” on staff who can help you with the process. It’s an increasingly common library service even at second tier R1 schools. Some schools like Emory and George Mason already have Dataverses set up on the big Networks, so talk to your librarian and you can skip a step and go right to Collections and Studies. If you’re flying without professional librarian support give the good people at Harvard or UNC a call. The have full time employees to help researchers use their online tools.

Limitations of Dataverse

A word of caution. Dataverse has no curatorial oversight, the researcher must take primary responsibility for management of their own data. You get the server space and software, but its on you to use it properly. Thus researchers can upload missing or inadequate data, or they may use proprietary file formats. There is no built in migration of file formats, so expired formats will age and become more difficult to read with time. That researchers have uploaded their data does not guarantee that they have complied with standard ethical requirements such as IRB and confidentiality agreements. Because researchers are writing their own metadata, that metadata may be inaccurate. Or it may be impossible to interpret raw data if researchers fail to share coding documentation.

Additionally, Dataverse was not created with cultural anthropologists in mind. It was originally developed by the Harvard Institute of Quantitative Social Science to hold tabular data. It’s meant to hold the files for polls, surveys, and experiments and boasts robust, built-in statistical tools that won’t be useful to all of us. However, because the software is open source development of new tools for qualitative data is already underway.

While you can upload any kind of file to archive some file types are going to be better supported than others. For example I tried and failed to upload a 2.8GB .avi file. The user interface offers no loading bar to illustrate how far along the upload process is, so after an hour I gave up. This was not a problem as I uploaded .docx and .pdf, which passed through in flash. If you need to archive large files such as video you will have to contact your Dataverse Network host and request assistance. They will be happy to help you by archiving files over 2GB in size on the back end.

Although Dataverse can simply and easily be used as a private archive, changing the working culture of cultural anthropology to embrace an open data framework may be the biggest obstacle. We all have our own idiosyncratic way of organizing files in our hard drives. This is what real science looks like. Its messy, it sweeps bad empiricism under the rug. All the rhetorical flourishes in the world won’t hide the fact that organized data makes for better science, even if its just “science.” Perhaps in the future graduate programs will also include the practical education of training student researchers to create metadata and proactively care for their data as they go. Until then it may be a hard sell to convince non-quantitative anthropologists that they need to do more than back up their files to an external hard drive every now and then.

When you put something on paper that information is already in a fairly good state for long term storage. We take for granted the precarity of digital information. As the days of anthropologists composing their notes on index cards fade we all should be more concerned about the long term organization and storage of our digital data. These files will be the historical record of twenty-first century anthropology, but only if we care for them properly.

Thanks to Ole Villadsen who contributed with research for this post.

Déjà Lu is actually an anthology. Journals from around the planet select one article of their that they wish to feature, and contribute it to Déjà Lu, who then publishes it in open access format. The result is a scrumptious multilingual smorgasbord of anthropological treats.

American journals are heavily represented on Déjà Lu, since they are a large part of world anthropology. But there is a lot else on hand as well and the journal is a great way to discover new pieces to read, as well as new journals to follow, even if you are an ashamed monoglot like me. Suomen Antropologi usually keeps its content locked up pretty tight, but you can download Tim Ingold’s Westermark Lecture (like to PDF). SITES is a Pacific journal I’ve known about for a long time, but I would have missed it’s new issue on whakapapa if it wasn’t for Déjà Lu. And that’s really just the start.

Your interests are probably different than mine, so why don’t you go stroll over the Déjà Lu’s site and see what tickles your fancy?

One of the great things about running a well-established blog is that you can just cold-call interesting people and ask to interview them, and they’ll say yes.  Verso Books has had a long history of publishing works which have has a tremendous impact in anthropology, and so I’d always tried to stay up to date with what the press was doing. When it began selling ebooks directly through its website and offering them at discounted prices through sales, I got curious about what their plan want to keep their independent, progressive press operating in an era of Reduced Everything. I was very lucky, therefore, to have a chance to speak to the managing director of Verso, Jacob Stevens, who talked with me about Verso’s plans and future directions.

I came away from this interview tremendously impressed with Stevens and Verso more generally. Stevens’s strategic vision is remarkably clear and focused on what the key commitments of progressive publishing should be. At the same time, he’s thought outside the box in many ways — looking to journal subscriptions as a model for direct sales of monographs, or taking the lessons of the music industry and applying them to publishing. I think you’ll really enjoy this interview and the light it sheds on Verso’s plans for the future, and the state of independent publishing today.

AG: Let’s start by talking about your Christmas sale. That seemed to be a pretty major statement by Verso. The discounts were incredibly steep and the selection was very good. Could you tell why you decided to do that sale, how successful it was, and its role in your publishing strategy?

JS: We initiated a redesign of the website in 2008, always with the aim of launching a strong direct sales channel. That finally came about in March last year, and we took three decisions to try and make sure that it was a success and that it was noticed. The first one was to bundle ebooks with print. The second one was to offer discounts, and the third was to offer free shipping. Essentially, we were competing with Amazon.

What we decided to try right from the get-go was a big overall sale, to get people excited about it. And it worked extremely well. That was in the end of March and early April, 2014. And sales then dropped to a steady level, good and healthy but not nearly as high as our big initial sale. So we’re learning as we go along and we’ve decided that those headline discounts really work, they really get new people coming, we can now see whether it’s new visitors, or repeating ones, and a big sale where you allow people to choose across the whole list seems to be the most effective thing.

So we’ve just got to decide now how often and when we can do that. We want it to continue to work, but we don’t want it to put people off from buying at other times. And so the end-of-year sale was the next really big one that we really tried. We initially began with the same terms, which was a 50 percent sale, but then in the last week we also did a steeply discounted ebooks sale.

Again, mainly with the aim of bringing in new readers. There was a feeling that with selling our own ebooks that there is a bit of a hurdle for people to get over, if they’re used to Amazon or Apple’s way of delivering ebooks.  We needed to make it attractive, show people that the process they works fine, show that it’s easy, and then we can continue selling to those people, and they’ll become readers who are happy to buy from the website.

So it was a great success. Our direct sales were a little more than we expected in the first year. It reached, within a year, 16 percent of our global revenue which is basically three quarters of a million dollars.

AG: Many university presses that are trying to innovate in this space have difficulty because they don’t have much of a cushion if they fail. What was the broader―

JS: I would flip that on its head. They all, to differing extents and in different ways, have subsidies from the universities. Their cost structure might be different, their margins might be different, they may be choosing to publish in different ways, but they do, as a matter of fact, have a cushion, which a company like Verso doesn’t have.

AG: So in that case, was this a situation where you felt you had to make this move, given where you were financially, or was this something that you felt like you wanted to do because of the long term?

JS: I became the managing director of Verso in 2008. And the aim was always going to be to not go bust, to grow at what seems to be a sustainable rate, to make a bit of profit and be able to invest it back in the company. So all the things that I’m doing here are ways to do that.

We weren’t in particularly dire financial straits, but at the point where I took over Verso we had that financial crash and then we had a massive shakeout in the book industry. So, I was very aware of the difficulties of the industry as a whole, and I watched a number of very good publishing houses who I respected have to lay people off or go through a hard time one way or another. I realized we needed to be in a robust enough position to deal with events like Borders going under. Would we be OK? What would we do in a situation where Barnes & Nobles goes under, or Amazon decides to disable our ‘buy’ button, right? Or there’s some other kind of shakeout?

So the aim there is to try to make a bit of money so that you’ve got a bit of a cushion, but secondly try and make sure you’ve got enough diverse sources of revenue. So as we watch the percentage of our sales coming from Amazon creep up from 15 to 20 to 30 to 40%, we need to broaden our sources of sales. It’s not rocket science: The only available move is to augment the trade sales with direct sales, and build a base of people who are buying from you directly.

And if you’re coming from a journal model, from a subscription model, again, that’s obvious. Journals know who their subscribers are, they know where they are, they know how much they’re paying, they know what their contact details are, they might have their credit card details ― and that’s valuable. Book publishers traditionally don’t have any of that, apart from the handful that have made a success from direct sales. And so we tried to look at who had made a success, and how it worked, and what the strengths were, the website and their social media, and to make it happen.

AG: And so who were some of those people?

JS: Mainly journals. Since then, there’s a couple I’ve come to know better. The obvious one is OR Books, which was founded by Colin Robinson and John Oakes, which you may know of, who do purely direct sales.

AG: Yeah, I think I’ve purchased a book from them before. Jihadi’s Return, I think.

JS: Colin used to work with us so we followed the founding of that company and what it’s aim was, which was essentially an Amazon workaround tout court, and a trade workaround. totally digitally published and totally directly sold. There are publishers like Haymarket who are obviously political publishers, they have a lot more direct contact with their readers through their presence at all kinds of events and conferences. They also have a direct sales component.

One of the ones that we watched from right at the beginning was Melville House, who grew out of a newsletter and always had the online component and, you know, they were mailing books out of their office but had a good direct sales presence from the beginning too. That was part of the deal when they moved to Random House, was, “We have this operation; this is part of what we do.”

AG: So, what is the future for the ecosystem of independent publishers? You obviously don’t want to be locked into a situation where Amazon is always standing between you and your readers. But what is it that you would like to see in the future? Is it constant social media outreach? Every time somebody wants to buy a book they have to go to the publisher to find it and buy it?

JS: I think the thing that we learned from these sales is that people were happy to have alternatives to the big online retailers. When they realize that they can deal directly with us and not through a big retailer, they were happy to do that. Because I think that, in both the U.K. the U.S., people are keen and happy to support an independent publishing house ― and relieved to. And if you make it really easy by offering a bundled ebook that they wouldn’t have got, and the same terms in terms of discounts and shipping, then people are going to do that in large numbers.

I don’t know how that’s going to go. I would hope that we are going to see a growing percentage of our sales done directly, but I would also hope that’s not going to mean any fewer sales out there in the trades. There’s always going to be a role for the bookstores and for the online retailers. People are going to come find us in different ways.

Now, our social media, is obviously going to be different from Amazon’s or Penguin Random House, because we’ve got a political and intellectual mission, and we can also have a lot more fun with it. Our Twitter following is based on the fact that we’re not just talking about our books, we’re not just selling them; we’re talking about current events, we’re talking about other people’s books, and articles, and anything we think that is going on that’s interesting. And, you know, that’s something Amazon won’t be able to do.

In terms of how we get new readers, obviously Facebook and Twitter are going to continue to be crucial to that. One of the other things that is part our road map, is that we don’t yet have the full content of all of our books available for access and search. And that’s always been an aim of mine. And I think that once we get to that point, where the full content of Verso’s list is being indexed by Google and others, then we’ll get a lot more people coming over to our site organically, because they’re searching for things, and from there they can buy the books.

AG: It seems like so much of what I use Amazon for is discovery, awareness, filtering, locating contents I want to purchase ― but not necessarily purchasing it. Is social media going to be able to fulfill that same quality of curation that Amazon’s algorithms are doing in the background?

JS: It’s all curation. The essential job of a publishing house is curation. Look at our Twitter feed: We’re calling out not just our authors and our books and what they’re currently up to, but also those of our comrades and one might say competitors, and if something interesting or good has just happened, or Haymarket, or one of our authors published a book elsewhere, we’re calling that out. And so then it becomes a kind of selected curation. Or a curation of like-minded publishing houses and writers.

AG: You really don’t see a role for sort of a portal of independent publishers where people can come search for your books. You just see social media as the main way to connect with readers like that.

JS: One would need to work out what that means. The kind of Yahoo! version of that didn’t work. There are elements of the direct sales model that Verso has built, that I think could be used by other publishers. And in fact we’re exploring at the moment licensing some of the code of our website, you know, the user interface, the way that we’re bundling ebooks, the way that we’re watermarking our ebooks ― we’re looking at licensing that to one or two other independent publishing houses, so that they can try the same model. So that’s not a portal, but it is a sharing of technology, a sharing of ways that independent publishers can work.

AG: I ask because open access publishers like ANU Epress and others have the directory of open access books, and they are creating these centralized locations. So it’s interesting and noteworthy that that’s not the way that Verso and other independent publishers have decided to go.

JS: I mean, you’ve got to go to where people are. So when I talk about the power that I think would come from putting all of our books digitally, in full, online, I’m looking at Google. I’m just looking at the fact that that’s where people are and where they’re looking for particular terms, for particular topics, that’s where they’re searching.

When we first built our website we built discussion forums for people to discuss our books. And that didn’t work at all because the place where people were discussing our books was Facebook and Twitter. And so we stripped out all that stuff because it wasn’t being used. And now what we do is engage with where people are doing this. I wouldn’t want to build a new portal if that would mean trying to badly reproduce anything that Facebook and Twitter and Google have nailed with now billions of dollars.

AG: Some presses are very worried about ebooks because they enable piracy, or they fear the circulation of .PDF’s, basically. But you folks have gone with no DRM as I understand it.

JS: We call it “social DRM,” which is a term that we took probably from the company that we’re licensing the technology from, Bookxtream, who watermark our ebooks so that if there is anyone who uploads these to file sharing sites, the file that will be shared has their name and e-mail address all over it.

AG: I saw that, I thought that was very cute.

JS: I think cute’s definitely a word that you could use. I mean their aim is to make clear that we’re not selling these books to people so that they can upload them and share them; we want the author to get their cut, we want to make sure that everybody who is involved in the production of the book is paid. We also need to be able to reassure authors and agents that we’re doing something to address those concerns.

But at the same time, I recognize that if you have legal and easy ways to allow people to buy digital content, they will buy it more often than they will try and pirate it. That’s what we learned from the music industry, and I think that’s what we learned from others who make it easy rather than difficult to download new things. So the great attraction, the great reason to do the watermarking that we did rather than try and impose  DRM, is that, if you get a download and put it on your machine and you can put it on any one of your readers and you don’t run into arcane DRM restrictions that trip you up.

AG: It’s quite personalized. Some of the big publishers in academic journals watermark articles with very generic codes that indicate your IP address and the date it was downloaded, whereas yours just has the person’s name there.

JS: We did a pretty straightforward implementation of the model that Booxtream had put in place, and we’re going to continue tweaking it. They’ve been good to work with, and I think that they’ve had other publishers reach out to them since we launched. And I think it’s a really good compromise between the interests of authors and agents and publishers and the readers who want to be able to read it on their device they’ve got.

The user we had in mind was someone who wanted to buy the book and start reading it. We can mail it to them, and it might take a few days ― they might be a student on a deadline, they might be an writer on a deadline, or they might just want to start reading it. And they’ve probably got more than one device, they’ve also got their laptop. And that’s an attractive thing. And any kind of DRM is gonna get in the way of that.

AG: Absolutely. These are the things that you hear people saying all of the time, who have thought about these issues, and yet for some reason this has been so rarely implemented.

JS: We had one lovely Tweet that said, “I like the way the publisher is bundling ebooks with print. This feels like the future.” And I thought, “Yes. Good.”

AG: Speaking of the opposite of the future, I seem to remember that the ebooks you have are all flowable text. Is there any sense that you might branch into .PDF’s, just so that academics can have page numbers? Or are those days just gone?

JS: I mean the mess with which page numbers and basic structural features were handled by Amazon and others is something that we’ve spent quite a while grappling with. I think .PDF’s have a set of their own problems, and I think that for most of the readers now ― bearing in mind that we don’t know the screen sizes ― it’s better to have flowable text. There is no reason, technically, why you can’t have page number tabs at exactly the same points that they are on the print edition, to allow proper academic citation.

You know, the ebooks standard had page number tabs from the get go. And yet, conversion houses and publishers and Amazon didn’t view this as important because they were basing it entirely on genre fiction, which was where the sales were initially. So when we started saying to conversion houses, you know, “We want page number tabs. We want them in the same place as the print edition,” we ran into resistance, we ran into increased conversion costs. Now we do that. I mean, if you download the ebook of anything from the last couple of years of ours, then you’ll find that 9 times out of 10 the page numbers are going to be in the same place as the print edition.

I wish that Amazon and Apple had taken more seriously the challenge of structurally complex books and what different types of page layout meant for the move to ebook. And I think that eventually we’ll catch up and solve those problems, but it’s still a bit of a free-for-all.

AG: Well, you know, as you’ve said, digitizing a book is not just a matter of scanning the pages and running OCR. As you start moving more of your back catalogue into this ebook format, is that something that’s going to cost a lot?

JS: Yeah. It’s something that I wanted to do back in 2007 and 2008. I’d already digitized the whole of the 40-year backlist of New Left Review, while I was there, and that was affordable. And it was clear where we were going to get the revenue from, and the universities would to pay for digital access to NLR’s Journal. When I moved to Verso, to the book publishing house, it was unclear where the revenue would come from for the big project of digitizing Verso’s 40-year backlist. And the ebook sales at that point were just too low. The conversion costs were relatively high, compared to where they are now, and the revenue was relatively low, because it was still a small percentage of the overall readership. So we’re getting closer and closer to the point where I think we can flip the switch and just say “We’re going to digitize the lot.” Because the costs of conversion are still dropping, now, in addition to the 10-15% of the trade who are reading digitally, we’ve also got a much bigger percentage of our online direct-sales audience who are reading digitally. So we can see where the revenue would come from. So we can see spending the tens of thousands that it would cost to go further back and digitize the rest of our books.

AG: Is there any chance that you’ll take a look at open accessing some of the classic content that you folks have?

JS: Yes, absolutely. And my hope would be to make as much of it available to everybody as possible. I think what we’re going to do is evaluate some kind of subscription model, initially, and then look at which things and what kind of access we can allow more broadly to everyone. We have to work out how to get that kind of balance right.

AG: Right, because the other side of publishing that I’ve noticed are subscription services like Scribd, Oyster, Kindle Unlimited.

JS: We signed up with Oyster and they have a set of our books. With those services, it’s sort of like the early days of the ebook and it’s still largely driven by fiction, especially genre fiction, and so the numbers of readers through that kind of thing for our kinds of books are still very low.

AG: So you see those as potential partners, you don’t see Verso offering $20 a month or whatever amount of money a month to read the Verso catalogue on your website.

JS: I think we could offer something complimentary. I think we’ve got a core readership which is reading many of our books. Whereas when we’re working with someone like Oyster, we’re dealing largely with people who are just going to hit on one or two of our trade titles. So I would think that we could offer a different subscription model to a different kind of reader, while still partnering quite happily with things like Oyster.

I mean I would say it’s crucial with Oyster that it’s not on the Spotify model. The Oyster model is when one of their readers reads a certain percentage of the book, they pay a discounted portion of the list price to the publisher. So it’s like someone bought that book. Which means that Oyster will work if they have enough subscribers, and they’re not reading so many books, they have to pay out too much to publishers. But it’s not like Spotify where there’s no minimum payment, essentially, and artists get fractions of a cent for their songs being played. The Oyster model is much friendlier to publishers like us that want to sign on.

AG: So, what is in the immediate future for you folks? Are there going to be more sales? Monthly sales? I see you’re giving away anthologies of contemporary writing through an e-mail list. What’s are your future directions?

JS: Well we’re experimenting massively, and possibly wildly, at the moment. We put together an end-of-year anthology that has the best writing we published the year before, at the end of last year, and that was a success. And again that’s not something that book publishers do. It was meant to be a move a little more like a journal, in that we were taking chapters and extracts and trying to give people a sense of the list as a whole. And we’re doing those kinds of sample readers now in different, slightly more focused areas, so we did one with our feminist radical thinker series, and we will be doing others of those. We are not going to do sales every month, but we will do sales in particular areas, so, you’re probably going to see sales around particular authors, or around particular areas that we’re publishing in. And we do expect to continue doing some bigger sales, but fewer. So no more than two or three a year of the bigger sales. Which will be seasonal, obviously.

And then, we’re doing a a tweak of the website layout and pages with the same fantastic designer, Andy Pressman (of Rumors), who did our initial website. And then the next big challenge is to get the full content of the books out and readable, browseable, on the site. So, sort of functionally like Amazon’s Look Inside the Book, except redesigned from the ground up so that it’s part of our website, so that it presents the pages in a way that we think works, and allows people to do things like check references and check quotes and read into the book that they’re interested in buying.

AG: You don’t worry that that’s going to eat into sales?

JS: No. I’m 95% certain that it’s going to increase them

AG: Right.

JS: But we will have to look at exactly where and how the pay wall will operate. It will be more flexible and have more access than Amazon’s Look Inside the Book or the Google Book equivalent, which block out arbitrary sets of pages. My feeling is that it would work a bit more like the New York Times’s paywall, where when people have come in with a directed search of some kind, you allow them access to what they’re looking for, and then you bring down the paywall to say “now you can buy to get the rest.”

AG: That’s a lot of backend for an independent publisher. You talked about working with Book Stream and other partners, but it sounds like a major part of Verso’s effort is expanding into areas that are not books. The kind of thing that readers benefit from, but they don’t see that hard work that goes into making that functionality.

JS: And it’s only possible to the extent that we can pay for these kinds of developments from our current sales. We’re not borrowing money, we have no external support. Development is expensive. Good developers aren’t cheap, good designers aren’t cheap. What I’ve been doing for seven years now, is that you break it down into small bits. And we do it bit by bit. I would’ve happily built the direct sales component in 2008. But it had to wait until we were able to do it in the right way and to roll it out stage by stage.

AG: And it requires a sense of the long term. Perhaps corporate publishers don’t have the ability to keep their eye on the ball over the long period in that way.

JS: Anyone who’s answerable to shareholders, especially if they’re publicly listed, is going to have a shorter-term focus. Verso is lucky to be a private company which is owned and set up by people who have in mind the health of their political and intellectual project, rather than yearly dividends. So we’ve always been able to re-invest and don’t have the same financial constraints of a major publishing house or anyone owned by a conglomerate.

It can be a bit confusing navigating around JASO’s site, but it’s definitely worth your while. Their latest issue is on sexual harassment in the field, a topic that has been the topic of increasing attention in the blogosphere and and the discipline more widely. On this score, JASO couldn’t be more relevant to what’s going on in anthropology today.

As someone interested in the history of anthropology, however, it’s really in the back issues (over  twenty five years of them) that JASO really shines. Here, the journal shows how a small group of people embarked on a shared project can create. The ups and downs of the department are recorded in every issue — book reviews show you what the department thought of the outside world, while obituaries help it mourn its own. I feel like a biography of Godfrey Lienhardt could be written out of just these back issues alone. It’s rich stuff to explore, and its all open access.

Ultimately, the quiet way JASO publishes its material may not result in a tremendous ‘impact’ of the sort that audit culture likes to see. But that’s ok. A quick look at the list of contributors make it clear that this journal is not just a platform for producing scholarship, it’s a platform for nurturing scholars and reproducing institutions.

Go dig around the site — it’s a rich enough archive that I’m sure there’s something there to tickle your fancy or to underwrite a teachable class example.

Ryan Anderson: So I just finished grad school, and I’m focusing on publishing some articles. I remember a while back you mentioned that you want to commit to publishing all Open Access (OA) articles, and I am right there with you. I think it’s important to push OA forward through our own work. Have you started looking into this?

Jeremy Trombley: OA is always in my mind, but I haven’t had the opportunity to publish too much yet so it hasn’t been a major issue. I have one co-authored with my advisor in a journal called Estuaries and Coasts, which has the option of publishing OA. But now I’m in the process of writing three(!) articles, and I’m thinking about where to publish them — if I ever get around to finishing them.

So that’s where I’m at, I guess. I think it’s a real challenge as a grad student trying to get publications so that I can get noticed so that I can maybe — if the stars align, and I pick the right lotto numbers, and my I Ching comes out well — get a job when I graduate. At the same time, I’m increasingly wondering if I should even bother with academia or focus on learning skills that might be useful in the “real world” — which I want to do anyway, but it’s hard to balance with all the writing, reading, etc. I have to do otherwise.

RA: I hear that. I spent so much time with anthropologies and Savage Minds during graduate school that I didn’t make much time for publishing in journals. I did have the chance to be the co-author with Jason Jackson on a piece about open access for Cultural Anthropology, which was a great learning experience. Looking back though, I’m actually glad I took the route I did, because being so active with blogging really shaped my thinking and engagement with anthropology. It was a vital part of what I learned and what anthropology came to mean for me. Being connected to all of the people on the Open Anthropology Cooperative and here at Savage Minds really shifted anthropology around for me. I wasn’t just talking to people in my seminars, I was also getting into conversations, debates, and arguments with people all around the world about everything from the role of anthropologists in war to this Open Access business. It was great, really. I think I was so hooked on the anthro blogosphere and all of this online activity because it connected me to these wider conversations and issues that I would never have experienced otherwise. It opened things up for me. Made me rehink a lot of what I was doing.

I did all of that despite all of the pressure to publish in journals and other official venues. For me, the timing wasn’t right to try to send something to a journal at that time, since I still needed to finish my research. The pressure to publish is insane, if you ask me. I’m all for publishing and I think it’s a vital part of what we do — but I think the overarching political economy of academia has seriously warped the publishing process. Sometimes I feel it’s all so overwhelming that we’re all scrambling trying to just get something accepted to satisfy the beast. This is especially the case for grad students and recent PhDs. We’re freaking out about publishing, because, you know, it’s impossible to get considered for jobs without publications. Everyone knows this. But, if you think about it, what’s the point of that in the long run? I’m not sure it bodes well when the primary motive is keeping up with market demands and competition. Somewhere in all of this the actual point of publishing — sharing ideas and knowledge — gets lost, if not outright abandoned.

And then there’s the job thing. The market is pretty grim, just like pretty much every article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed and Inside Higher Ed I read in grad school said it would be. It’s fun to get to this point and realize, hey, well, at least now I know Sarah Kendzior and Karen Kelsky weren’t kidding. I’m being sarcastic, but none of this is actually funny.

I’m not banking on a job in academia. Who knows what will happen? I’m trying, but I feel like I have to look beyond the academy as well. Cast a wide net and all that. Be creative, keep an open mind. That means I have to think carefully about where I focus my time and energy. I know what you mean about the difficulties of trying to balance writing with everything else. There’s the pressure of picking up skills and experience in the so-called real world, and then there’s all the time and energy that’s required to move through the ranks of academia. It’s a total catch-22 situation.

JT: It certainly seems as though the OA issue, and publishing generally is bound up with all of the issues we’ve talked about in the past so that you can’t really fix one without seriously considering and working on the others: the issue of jobs, funding, and debt; the issue of broader relevance outside of academia; even the issue of diversity since publishers and editors are, in a lot of ways, gatekeepers determining who gets published where, which is an essential part of who gets hired where. It’s not to say that OA solves all of those problems, but that addressing access will require addressing those problems and addressing those problems requires, in part, addressing the issue of access. That’s why the OA is important, but also why it’s so difficult.

After I said I would avoid publishing in non-OA journals, a number of issues have come to mind. First, there’s the issue of co-authoring. So much of what we do as graduate students is co-author with advisors — these are generally our first experiences with academic publishing — and we often don’t get a say in what journals we write for as co-authors. There is a degree of recalcitrance — justified, I think — on the part of some established faculty members with respect to OA. They are concerned about the quality of the publications, the notoriety or ranking of the publication, and other very practical concerns — particularly for early career academics. So much hinges, not just on getting published, but getting published in the right journals. It affects our job prospects, tenure, promotions, etc. This is another issue I’ve been thinking a lot about, and it seems that most of the OA journals out there now don’t have the status of the more traditional journals. I think that is changing with HAU and now Cultural Anthropology going OA, but the field is limited and the competition is intense.

Anyway, I don’t think OA will be the solution to all of this. But I think it is part of the process of figuring out a solution. I am also encouraged by many of the para-academic experiments I see around.

That’s a lot to process, and only scratches the surface, of course, but I’d like to hear what you think. I suppose an important question is this: If we agree that OA is an important part of fixing these broader academic problems, how do we promote it? How do we make it so that publishing in OA journals is a good, and viable option for established anthropologists who can afford to take the risk, but also for early career anthropologists, or minority anthropologists who need to work especially hard to be noticed?

RA: There’s the big question. In order to address the problems you mention — and I agree with you that this is about much more than just publishing — Open Access has to work. It has to draw excellent submissions, just as much as it has to pull in readers. I think Hau is doing things right. Hau works. Museum Anthropology Review is another excellent example. Cultural Anthropology is right in there. All of these are good models. But then, all of them also completely replicate traditional journals, and I often wonder if the solution — or, at least, another part of the solution — might be something very different, far more open. We really cling to this model in which we want to see articles posted under the banner of one particular journal or another with a big name, all sanctioned by peer review. Maybe we need something else entirely. I am also concerned about the connection between publishing, status, and getting jobs. In my view one of the goals of open access publishing is to break down some of the hierarchies that permeate academia.

But there’s another issue you brought up earlier — there actually aren’t that many choices when it comes to Open Access in anthropology. There are some, and Matt Thompson here at Savage Minds recently compiled a list. But I don’t think it’s enough to sustain a massive shift. There are a few good venues that I know about out there, but then the herd sort of thins out and it’s hard to tell which ones are running strong and which are, sorry for the extended analogy, infected with some sort of malady and destined for failure. In short, I think we need more places to take our work. But the other issue is that these venues also have to have the infrastructure in place to actually curate this work for the long haul. As Tim Elfenbein reminded me a while back, that’s no small issue. But then, I don’t think that should completely determine how we think about all of this.

In my case I was planning on sticking with all open access publishing, but I’m not sure if that’s actually viable. But maybe that’s just the issue — at what point do we all decide it’s time to really make this work? How will it ever be possible to make a dramatic change if all of us just keep milling around in the lobby waiting for someone else to start the show? Maybe now is the time. And this is where I think your question about “promotion” comes into it, and that may be a matter of finding, sharing, and building upon a core collection of discipline-specific OA venues so that more and more people not only publish OA, but also read it. Maybe part of the solution is changing what we think of as the “right” venue?

JT: I remember something Zizek said in response to Picketty’s Capital. He said that Picketty has it right, but that, if we were to reach a point where the people in power would accept the kind of equality-based measures that Picketty was proposing, then we would have already won. In other words, the structural changes that would be required for them to accept those kinds of policies are the real challenge. Now, you can agree with Zizek or not, but I think something similar may be true for academia and open access. The structural changes that would be required for really good open access to take hold would themselves manifest many of the changes we are seeking through open access. Again, that’s not to say that we shouldn’t pursue open access within the current academic system, but that we can’t expect the high quality open access that we want until some of those broader issues have been addressed. As a result, the push for open access means struggling against the neoliberalization of the University, struggling for employment in academia and beyond, struggling for diversity within the discipline, struggling for better relationships between Universities and the communities in which they are located, and so on.

In the meantime, I think we work on doing open access as best we can, and hope that it pushes those other issues a little further along — as you say, helping to break down the hierarchies that permeate academia. And in some ways I think the fight for open access means acting beyond or outside of academia, and this is why the para-academic projects interest me so much. You and I have both been engaged in academic blogging for a while now, and it has been a formative aspect of my academic career — allowing me to engage with anthropologists, philosophers, and a variety of others at varying stages in their career. Figuring out ways to integrate those activities more into our formal academic lives might be a good start. I am also fascinated by para-academic publishers like Punctum Books — Eileen Joy’s commitment and stamina organizing that as well as the Babel Working Group is inspiring, but not something everyone can do. And then there are models of para-academic — or maybe extra-academic — research. Organizations like the Public Laboratory or the Institute for Community Research are doing great work, and provide great models for others interested in non-traditional research practices.

It’s possible to critique all of these activities by pointing out that they still depend, to varying degrees and in different ways, on the traditional academic structure. But we can’t really know what the academy will look like in 10 years — it could be completely dead, and growing in place of its rotting shell, a number of for-profit colleges whose only interest is their bottom line. Or it could be that some of these para-academic experiments might begin to group together and take on a life of their own — a genuine alternative to the neoliberal University. We can’t know.

RA: It is hard to know where things are going with all of this. I have no idea. But I’d rather not just stand by and watch it all happen. As Phil Ochs once said:

I can’t add my name into the fight when I’m gone,

So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here

The time is now. That’s what that song is all about. I get inspired when I see people doing things differently when it comes to higher education — the folks at the Saxifrage school are doing some particularly good stuff. I like the whole idea of paring intellectual learning with the practical skills of actually making things. I also like the idea of taking underutilized spaces and turning them into alternative places for college-level learning. We need more of this kind of thinking. Along similar lines, I also find the folks at Deep Springs College very inspirational — I first heard about them on the CNN documentary Ivory Tower. Granted, Deep Springs is very, very small but I think it’s another example of thinking about college differently.

So the alternative thinking is out there. This brings me to the essay by Eileen Joy that you sent to me. That piece is just brimming with creativity and resistance to the corporatization of academia — and I love it. First, she talks about the idea of “biodiversity” in intellectual matter and media. This is a powerful point that people often gloss over in the rush to innovation and the digitalization of everything imaginable. Joy says we should not just ditch the past and push forward. Instead, we need to grab onto the old and the new in order to create the “most richly tapestried and noisy public commons we can.” We need printed books, we need articles, sure — but we also need all the various forms of illegitimate (or “bastard”) forms of communication she talks about as well. We don’t just need some trickle down knowledge economy in which the authorities (ie academics) preach to the commoners from the mountaintop. Joy advocates a “rowdy democracy,” and Open Access that means more than just allowing people to read the articles we write. For her, Open Access means that more people have the ability to use and take part in the system of publication and production itself.

Beyond all of that, I am especially drawn to Joy’s arguments about authority and prestige. Forget authority and prestige, she says. Stand up for bastard thought — for the kind of writing, communicating, and sharing that is about something more than market demand and competition. She’s openly defiant of the idea that the university should be seen as a business — and I agree with this. Hers is a call to reinvent the academy in direct opposition to the forces of “professionalization,” which reduce the intellectual project to little more than a way of measuring productivity through individual competition (in part via publications). Again, the university has to be something more than a business, she tells us. And publishing is part of that. Joy reminds us that the reason to publish, ultimately, is because we are “existentially obligated to others.” Publishing isn’t just another product. Or, it shouldn’t be. It’s about communicating, which means it’s also about building community.

US academia loves to pretend that community is still at the heart of its mission, but I have my doubts. It’s about exclusion as much as anything else, and the way the publishing system works is just one small part of it. So, getting back to something you said earlier, I think Zizek is right. The problems that Open Access is meant to address do exist at higher levels. It is a bigger fight — and that leaves us wondering what we can do in the here and now. This brings me back to our musings about publishing. We all know we need to publish to be even remotely considered for jobs. But how can we push back a bit? I think a more strident dedication to Open Access can be part of that. I am all for publishing and sharing ideas, but I think the terms in which we produce and disseminate our ideas need to be challenged.

JT: Yeah, I don’t mean to diminish our agency on the issue by calling attention to the broader issues. In fact, I think it extends our agency, while also, potentially, spreading it a little thinly (Where to start? How can anyone do it all?).

To start with, there are things that have to do directly with open access. You and I have both committed to publishing open access, if not exclusively then at every opportunity. I think that’s a great commitment, and I’d like to see more people take that chance — some can’t, some simply won’t. It would be great to get more later-career anthropologists to make that same commitment, but in addition to that, to weigh open access publication, and other forms of “outreach” more heavily in hiring and tenure considerations. Another possibility is focusing on citation practices. Lynne Bolles, for example, suggests citing women and anthropologists of color primarily as a political practice. The same could be done for open access, as long as it doesn’t detract from the politics of race and gender that she and others are working to promote. Then there’s the issue mentioned before of the lack of open access journals for publishing — if more people are going to start committing to open access publishing, these already underfunded and often struggling groups will become oversaturated. So we need to start more of them, and let the options proliferate — creating the biodiversity, as Joy points out. I personally would like to see more student-run and organized journals for students (like Imponderabilia) — that’s not just a call to students to get to work making those journals, but also a call to departments and faculty to support students in that process.

Those are some possibilities in the open access arena, but I think there’s a whole lot more we can do, too, that will not only make open access more… accessible…but also make the University a much better place in general. Things like fighting for better funding of Universities, revising hiring and tenure standards to embrace outreach, engagement, and alternative forms of publishing, and, generally, building community as you point out. I see this as a collective effort, and we all need to support one another and put in our share of the work if it’s going to amount to anything. It’s easy to fall into cynicism, particularly as a graduate student with steadily increasing debt and uncertainty about what comes after, but there is a lot being done, and change won’t happen instantly. I am guardedly optimistic that change will happen, though, and that we’ll have a better University because of it.

University presses seem to be jumping on the bandwagon, and some now produce trailers for their “cross-over” books. For Ruth Behar’s latest book, Traveling Heavy: A Memoir Between Journeys, Duke University Press released a short trailer featuring the author as she prepares for a trip. For her monograph, We Want What’s Ours: Learning from South Africa’s Land Restitution Program, author Bernadette Atuahene gives a passionate two-minute overview of her argument. Princeton University Press produced a dramatic one-minute trailer for Adrienne Mayor’s book, The Amazons, and a thoughtful two-minute synopsis featuring sociologist Amin Ghaziani discussing his book, There Goes the Gayborhood?.

Harvard University Press’s trailer for The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, has almost 7,500 views, and Yale University Press has an entire YouTube channel called “Book Trailers.” The University of California Press promotes its book, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet, through a video that makes use of the author’s charming illustrations. Cambridge University Press even has a short trailer promoting itself, apparently to convince aspiring academic authors to consider CUP for their next book project.

Obviously, book trailers make more sense for books that might find an audience beyond the tight circle of the author’s disciplinary peers, but even so, my initial reaction to the academic book trailer phenomenon was that it might contribute to the McDonaldization of scholarship. Intellectual work becomes trivialized if reduced to a soundbite.

A friend recommended that I watch this short video of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson discussing the “Anatomy of a Soundbite,” and after some consideration, I wondered if perhaps the academic book trailer could serve as a kind of multimedia abstract. After all, every book, no matter how voluminous and complex, gets reduced to a three-to four-hundred-word blurb on its own back cover. We all write short paragraphs summarizing the findings of our articles, and even edited volumes with multiple authors require short promotional descriptions.

Reluctantly, I took the plunge. For my latest book, my colleagues, David Redmon and Ashley Sabin at Carnivalesque Films, generously agreed to put together a short trailer using some of my historical images. The Left Side of History is a somber book about leftist ideologies, World War II, and the Bulgarian Holocaust, and the video had to distill a complicated historical argument into three minutes. They did a beautiful job, but I still felt nervous and uncomfortable about the whole book trailer genre. It just didn’t feel like the kind of thing a serious academic book should have.

I was therefore quite stunned yesterday morning when Shelf Awareness, an electronic newsletter that reaches about 33,000 professionals in the book industry (publishers, editors, librarians, booksellers, etc.) featured David and Ashley’s video as their “Book Trailer of the Day.” While it’s wonderful to know that people outside of academia might be compelled to read the book, I fear that my scholarly peers will be more inclined to ignore it.

So Savage Minds readers, what do you think of the academic book trailer? Are these trailers a harmless by-product of our Internet age or do they contribute to the increasing trivialization of scholarly research? Please weigh in.

For a more comprehensive listing of titles, including multidisciplinary journals of interest to cultural anthropologists, see this earlier post. My plan is to update this post with those additional titles in the spring semester.

Africa Spectrum, 2009-2014
Affiliation/ Sponsor: GERMAN INSTITUTE OF GLOBAL AND AREA STUDIES
Scope: “current issues in political, social and economic life; culture; and development in sub-Saharan Africa”

• Usage: CC-BY-ND
• Peer review: YES
• Author fee: NO
• Abstracts: YES
• Keywords: YES
• Social network buttons: NO
• Persistent ID for articles: URN
• View open metadata: YES
• Data preservation: Hamburg University Press & German National Library

Africa Studies Quarterly, 1997-2014
Affiliation/ Sponsor: UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA CENTER FOR AFRICAN STUDIES
Scope: “original manuscripts on a full range of topics related to Africa in all disciplines”

• Usage: © UF Board of Trustees
• Peer review: YES
• Author fee: NO
• Abstracts: YES
• Keywords: NO
• Social network buttons: NO
• Persistent ID for articles: NO
• View Open Metadata: NO
• Data preservation: University of Florida Library

Anthropoetics: Journal of Generative Anthropology, 1995-2014
Affiliation/ Sponsor: UCLA
Scope:”studies the works of human culture on the hypothesis that language, religion, art, and all things specifically human can be traced to a unique scene of origin”

• Usage: “The Author shall remain the sole owner of his/her manuscript and the copyright in that manuscript.”
• Peer review: ??
• Author fee: ??
• Abstracts: NO
• Keywords: NO
• Social network buttons: YES
• Persistent ID for articles: NO
• View open metadata: NO
• Data Preservation: ??

Anthropological Notebooks, 1995-2014
Affiliation/ Sponsor: SLOVENIAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
Scope: “The journal publishes manuscripts from the anthropological and related fields.”

• Usage: © Slovene Anthropological Society, reprints allowed with permission
• Peer review: YES
• Author fee: NO
• Abstracts: YES
• Keywords: YES
• Social network buttons: NO
• Persistent ID for articles: NO
• View open metadata: NO
• Data preservation: Slovenian National University Library

Anthropology & Aging, 2012-2014
Affiliation/ Sponsor: ASSOCIATION FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND GERONTOLOGY
Scope: “We are particularly interested in manuscripts that have cross-disciplinary appeal, that present cutting-edge research and bring creative and stimulating insight to aging studies and the human condition across the life course.”

• Usage: CC-BY
• Peer review: YES
• Author fee: AAGE MEMBERSHIP
• Abstracts: YES
• Keywords: YES
• Social network buttons: NO
• Persistent ID for articles: DOI
• View open metadata: YES
• Data preservation: LOCKSS

Anthropology of This Century, 2011-2014
Affiliation/ Sponsor: NONE
Scope: “reviews of recent works in anthropology and related disciplines, as well as occasional feature articles” (does not accept unsolicited manuscripts)

• Usage: © AOTC PRESS, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
• Peer review: UPON REQUEST
• Author fee: NO
• Abstracts: NO
• Keywords: NO
• Social network buttons: YES
• Persistent ID for articles: NO
• View open metadata: NO
• Data preservation: Online backup

Anthropology Matters, 1999-2014
Affiliation/ Sponsor: ASSOCIATION OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGISTS OF THE UK AND COMMONWEALTH
Scope: “issues of relevance to the learning and teaching of anthropology”

• Usage: “Individual contributors retain the copyright to their published material”
• Peer review: YES
• Author fee: NO
• Abstracts: YES
• Keywords: YES
• Social network buttons: NO
• Persistent ID for articles: NO
• View open metadata: YES
• Data preservation: Online backup

Anthropology of East Europe Review, 1983-2014
Affiliation/ Sponsor: INDIANA UNIVERSITY
Scope: “to showcase fresh, up-to-date research and to help build a community of scholars who focus on the region [Eastern Europe, Russia, the Balkans, and Central Asia]”

• Usage: CC-BY
• Peer review: INTERNAL REVIEW ONLY
• Author fee: NO
• Abstracts: YES
• Keywords: YES
• Social network buttons: NO
• Persistent ID for articles: NO
• View open metadata: YES
• Data Preservation: LOCKSS & CLOCKSS

Asian Ethnology, 1942-2013
Affiliation/ Sponsor: NANZAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE FOR RELIGION AND CULTURE
Scope: “scholarly research on the peoples and cultures of Asia”

• Usage: © Asian Ethnology
• Peer review: YES
• Author fee: NO
• Abstracts: YES
• Keywords: YES
• Social network buttons: NO
• Persistent ID for articles: DOI FORTHCOMING
• View open metadata: NO
• Data Preservation: Institutional repository

Compaso: Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology, 2010-2014
Affiliation/ Sponsor: UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST
Scope: “Each Journal issue is centered on a specific topic, announced by a Call for Papers”

• Usage: CC-NC-ND
• Peer review: YES
• Author fee: NO
• Abstracts: YES
• Keywords: YES
• Social network buttons: NO
• Persistent ID for articles: NO
• View open metadata: NO
• Data preservation: Institutional repository

Cultural Anthropology, 1986-2014
Affiliation/ Sponsor: SOCIETY FOR CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Scope: “anthropological research, critical analysis, and academic writing of the very highest order”

• Usage: © American Anthropological Association
• Peer review: YES
• Author fee: SCA MEMBERSHIP
• Abstracts: YES
• Keywords: YES
• Social network buttons: YES
• Persistent ID for articles: DOI
• View open metadata: NO
• Data Preservation: LOCKSS & CLOCKSS

Dhaulagiri Journal of Sociology and Anthropology, 2005-2014
Affiliation/ Sponsor: TRIBHUVAN UNIVERSITY
Scope: “the areas of sociology and anthropology of Nepal and other regions”

• Usage: © Dhaulagiri Journal of Sociology and Anthropology
• Peer review: Yes
• Author fee: NO
• Abstracts: Yes
• Keywords: Yes
• Social network buttons: No
• Persistent ID for articles: DOI
• View open metadata: Yes
• Data preservation: LOCKSS (forthcoming)

Durham Anthropology Journal, 2004-2013
Affiliation/ Sponsor: DURHAM UNIVERSITY DEPT. OF ANTHROPOLOGY
Scope: “all anthropology topics, including social anthropology, medical anthropology, and evolutionary anthropology”

• Usage: “The authors retain the copyright”
• Peer review: YES
• Author fee: ??
• Abstracts: YES
• Keywords: YES
• Social network buttons: NO
• Persistent ID for articles: NO
• View open metadata: NO
• Data preservation: Durham Research Online Repository

Global Ethnographic, 2012-2014
Affiliation/ Sponsor: ORGANIZATION FOR INTRA-CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT
Scope: “field research and perspectives shaping our social world”

• Usage: “The Author agrees to a transfer of Copyright to the Publisher… [and] retains the right to use the Article in a non-commercial manner”
• Peer review: YES
• Author fee: NO
• Abstracts: SOME
• Keywords: SOME
• Social network buttons: YES
• Persistent ID for articles: NO
• View open metadata: NO
• Data preservation: Institutional repository

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2011-2014
Affiliation/ Sponsor: HAU-NETWORK OF ETHNOGRAPHIC THEORY
Scope: “to reinstate ethnographic theorization in contemporary anthropology”

• Usage: CC-NC-ND
• Peer review: YES
• Author fee: NO
• Abstracts: YES
• Keywords: YES
• Social network buttons: YES
• Persistent ID for articles: DOI
• View open metadata: YES
• Data preservation: LOCKSS

Himalayan Journal of Sociology and Anthropology, 2004-2014
Affiliation/ Sponsor: TRIBHUVAN UNIVERSITY, NEPAL
Scope: “to provide relevant readings for the students”

• Usage: ??
• Peer review: YES
• Author fee: ??
• Abstracts: YES
• Keywords: YES
• Social network buttons: NO
• Persistent ID for articles: DOI
• View open metadata: YES
• Data preservation: ??

Imponderabilia, 2009-2014
Affiliation/ Sponsor: UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
Scope: “a multidisciplinary student journal on anything anthropological”

• Usage: ??
• Peer review: ??
• Author fee: ??
• Abstracts: NO
• Keywords: NO
• Social network buttons: NO
• Persistent ID for articles: NO
• View open metadata: NO
• Data preservation: ??

Irish Journal of Anthropology 1996-2012 (2013-2014 EMBARGO; 2008-2010 MISSING)
Affiliation/ Sponsor: ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION OF IRELAND
Scope: “coverage of Irish related matters and issues of general anthropology”

• Usage: ©ANTHROPOLOGY IRELAND, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
• Peer review: YES
• Author fee: NO
• Abstracts: YES
• Keywords: YES
• Social network buttons: YES
• Persistent ID for articles: DOI forthcoming
• View open metadata: NO
• Data preservation: Institutional repository

Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 1970-2014
Affiliation/ Sponsor: ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF OXFORD
Scope: “especially but not entirely research that can be considered ‘work in progress’.”

• Usage: CC-BY
• Peer review: INTERNAL REVIEW ONLY
• Author fee: “These are set at 1p sterling (£0.01), and should be paid in cash when the author bumps into one of the Editors or anyone who knows them”
• Abstracts: SOME
• Keywords: SOME
• Social network buttons: NO
• Persistent ID for articles: NO
• View open metadata: NO
• Data preservation: University of Oxford Bodeleian Library

Journal of Business Anthropology, 2012-2014
Affiliation/ Sponsor: COPENHAGEN BUSINESS SCHOOL
Scope: “results of anthropological research in business organizations and business situations of all kinds”

• Usage: “Copyright for all material published on the journal’s Open Access website remains with its authors”
• Peer review: YES
• Author fee: NO
• Abstracts: YES
• Keywords: YES
• Social network buttons: YES
• Persistent ID for articles: NO
• View open metadata: NO
• Data preservation: ??

Museum Anthropology Review, 2007-2014
Affiliation/ Sponsor: INDIANA UNIVERSITY
Scope: “advancing the field of material culture and museum studies, broadly conceived”

• Usage: CC-BY
• Peer review: YES
• Author fee: NO
• Abstracts: YES
• Keywords: YES
• Social network buttons: NO
• Persistent ID for articles: DOI
• View open metadata: YES
• Data preservation: LOCKSS & CLOCKSS

Nordic Journal of African Studies, 1992-2013
Affiliation/ Sponsor: UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI
Scope: “African language studies, African literatures, African cultural studies”

• Usage: ©Nordic Association of African Studies
• Peer review: YES
• Author fee: NO
• Abstracts: YES
• Keywords: YES
• Social network buttons: NO
• Persistent ID for articles: NO
• View open metadata: NO
• Data preservation: University of Helsinki

Omertaa, 2007-2014
Affiliation/ Sponsor: EXPEDITIONS, RESEARCH IN APPLIED ANTHROPOLOGY
Scope: “the broader field of Applied Anthropology and related issues”

• Usage: “The authors themselves” retain copyright
• Peer review: YES
• Author fee: NO
• Abstracts: YES
• Keywords: YES
• Social network buttons: NO
• Persistent ID for articles: NO
• View open metadata: NO
• Data preservation: University of Leuven, Belgium

Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal, 2010-2014
Affiliation/ Sponsor: NONE
Scope: “social-scientific approaches to the study of paranormal experiences, beliefs and phenomena”

• Usage: CC-BY-SA
• Peer review: YES
• Author fee: No
• Abstracts: NO
• Keywords: NO
• Social network buttons: NO
• Persistent ID for articles: NO
• View open metadata: NO
• Data preservation: Archive.org

PopAnth
Affiliation/ Sponsor: NONE
Scope: “translates anthropological discoveries for popular consumption”

• Usage: “authors retain copyright”
• Peer review: INTERNAL REVIEW ONLY
• Author fee: NO
• Abstracts: NO
• Keywords: YES
• Social network buttons: YES
• Persistent ID for articles: NO
• View open metadata: NO
• Data preservation: Online backup

Radical Anthropology
Affiliation/Sponsor: RADICAL ANTHROPOLOGY GROUP
Scope: “a forum for discussing the political lessons that can be drawn from anthropology’s knowledge of the range of human possibilities”

• Usage: “Anti-copyright: all material may be freely reproduced for non-commercial purposes”
• Peer review: INTERNAL REVIEW ONLY
• Author fee: no
• Abstracts: NO
• Keywords: NO
• Social network buttons: NO
• Persistent ID for articles: NO
• View open metadata: NO
• Data preservation: University of East London ROAR

Structure and Dynamics, 2005-2014
Affiliation/ Sponsor: CALIFORNIA DIGITAL LIBRARY
Scope: “human evolution, social structure and behavior, culture, cognition, or related topics”

• Usage: CC-BY
• Peer review: YES
• Author fee: NO
• Abstracts: YES
• Keywords: YES
• Social network buttons: YES
• Persistent ID for articles: NO
• View open metadata: YES
• Data preservation: California Digital Library

Tipiti: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, 2003-2014
Affiliation/ Sponsor: SOCIETY FOR THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF LOWLAND SOUTH AMERICA
Scope: “high-quality, original anthropological research on lowland South America”

• Usage: “authors assign to Digital Commons @ Trinity all copyright in the article, subject to the expansive personal use exceptions”
• Peer review: YES
• Author fee: NO
• Abstracts: NO
• Keywords: NO
• Social network buttons: YES
• Persistent ID for articles: NO
• View open metadata: NO
• Data preservation: Digital Commons at Trinity University

The Unfamiliar, 2012-2014
Affiliation/ Sponsor: UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
Scope: “featuring not only academically informed articles and book reviews but creative work”

• Usage: CC-NC-SA
• Peer review: YES
• Author fee: NO
• Abstracts: YES
• Keywords: NO
• Social network buttons: YES
• Persistent ID for articles: DOI
• View open metadata: YES
• Data preservation: LOCKSS

Vis-à-vis: Explorations in Anthropology, 2008-2013
Affiliation/ Sponsor: UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
Scope: “graduate student work from any of the anthropology sub-fields”

• Usage: CC-NC-SA
• Peer review: YES
• Author fee: ??
• Abstracts: YES
• Keywords: YES
• Social network buttons: YES
• Persistent ID for articles: NO
• View open metadata: NO
• Data preservation: ??

In the meantime, check these out. The following titles have been updated at least once since 2013. Parenthetical notes are included to describe the titles if necessary.

Anthropology for a General Audience

American Ethnography
Journal of Indigenous research
PopAnth
Radical Anthropology

Anthropology for Scholars

Africa Spectrum (politics and economics)
Africa Studies Quarterly
Anthropoetics: Journal of Generative Anthropology (humanism)
Anthropological Notebooks
Anthropology & Aging
Anthropology of This Century
Anthropology Matters (student journal)
Anthropology of East Europe Review
Asian Ethnology
Compaso: Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology
Cultural Anthropology
Dhaulagiri Journal of Sociology and Anthropology (Nepal)
Durham Anthropology Journal
Global Ethnographic
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Himalayan Journal of Sociology and Anthropology
Imponderabilia (student journal)
Irish Journal of Anthropology
Journal of Anthropological Society of Oxford
Journal of Business Anthropology
Museum Anthropology Review
NatureCulture (STS)
Nordic Journal of African Studies (language and literature)
Omertaa (applied anthropology)
Paranthropology (paranormal studies)
Structure and Dynamics (quantitative studies)
The Unfamiliar (student journal)
Vis-à-vis: Explorations in Anthropology (student journal)

Multidisciplinary journals of interest

Approaching Religion
The Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus
Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies
Borderlands
Cosmopolitan Civil Societies (social change)
Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research
Current Conservation (ecology)
Diversities (UNESCO)
Environmental Humanities
European Journal of Turkish Studies
Folklore Forum (book reviews)
Glocalism: Journal of Cultural, Politics, and Innovation
International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies
International Journal of Intangible Heritage
Interpersona
Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific
Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies
Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine
Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics
Journal of Identity and Migration Studies
KULT (Postcolonial Denmark)
Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Science (bilingual)
New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry
Nordic Journal of migration research
Online Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet
Oral Tradition
People, Place, and Policy
Popular Musicology Online
Practical Matters (religion)
Semiotic Review
Shima: The International Journal of Research Into Island Cultures (Oceania)
South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal
Sri Lanka Journal of Advanced Social Studies
Studies of Tribes and Tribals (India)
TD: The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa
Valuation Studies