Open Access: New alliances threaten the American Anthropological Association

(via media anthropology) What is the purpose of organisations like the American Anthropological Association? What is the point of publishing articles? The free software movement forces anthropologists to rethink these questions, Christopher Kelty says in a conversation about anthopology and open access to scholarship.

The discussion between seven anthropologists was published in the journal Cultural Anthropology. The article Anthropology of/in Circulation: The Future of Open Access and Scholarly Societies is of course available online.

They talk among other things about new divisions between scholary organisations like the AAA and anthropologists who want to engage with the wider world by making their research more accessible online. Now, the largest part of anthropological research is locked behind login forms that only members of subscribed institutions can pass through. The AAA has not taken side with the open access movement but with the commercial publishing industry.

“All anthropologists who want to be part of the revolution in scholarly communication must do so outside of the AAA", Alex Golub says. The AAA has “made exactly the wrong allies".

One common argument against free access to scholarship has to do with economics: Journal subscriptions are an important part of the budget of organisations like the AAA.

But Jason Baird Jackson explains:

(I)f we want to think seriously about “sustainability” we must realize that sustaining anthropology means more than sustaining the AAA budget—it means sustaining the viability of research libraries and of our not-for- profit university press partners as well.

More and more research libraries today are responding by partnering directly with scholars to “publish” (…) research, and thus they are expanding the library’s role in new ways. They are trying to make scholarship more open and more sustainable by cutting out the middleman, the publishing companies. In doing so, they might make commercial publishing less profitable and scholarly societies built around toll access publication profits less sustainable.

So whose interests do you align with?

I’d like my efforts to help sustain the AAA, but the association’s interests are now more congruent with those of the publishing industry, not my library or the university presses. As a result the interests of my ethnographic consultants, my university library, my students, and my colleagues are increasingly in conflict with those of my professional society.

Alex Golub adds:

One of the key things about Free Software and Open Access (…) is that it allows things to get done extremely cheaply if you have the people who know how to work the technology. The AAA has failed to develop low-cost solutions using these methods, it has alienated much of a generation of younger scholars willing to devote their time to developing these solutions, and as a result it has thrown up its hands and outsourced this work to institutions like WB (Wiley-Blackwell).

WB then doubles the price of American Anthropologist, and makes money off of the AAA’s inability to manage its own publications program. We are all literally paying the price of the AAA’s inability to keep our house in order.

The AAA has developped AnthroSource where AAA members can browse through hundreds of journals. Jason Baird Jackson says we do not need AnthroSource anymore because of all the blogs, open access and other online initiatives that he calls the “Shadow AnthroSource":

(I)n a way what is happening now outside of the AAA is a “shadow AnthroSource” that fulfills the ambitions of the original AnthroSource. In its visionary phase, AnthroSource was going to have a subject repository in which we could have put our field notes, white papers, unpublished book manuscripts, etc. I saw this vision die during my first year as an editor.
(…)
However, we do not actually need AnthroSource anymore because we have already built it up out of various bits and pieces outside the AAA framework. We have a subject repository (Mana’o), we have a constellation of weblogs and key metablogs (such as antropologi.info), we have people like Mike Wesch and Chris showing us how to mix and match readily/freely available tools to build powerful research collaboratories (like Digital Ethnography and Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory / ARC
(…)
We have organizations like the EVIADA project (Ethnomusicological Video for Instruction and Analysis Digital Archive; ) and individual researchers like Kim building powerful, innovative database tools for use in our research and our collaborations with students and communities, there are people (like Rob Leopold at the National Anthropology Archives) in many archives and museums building great projects to make the archival database more accessible, we have folks like the team organized by the American Folklife Center and the American Folklore Society building metadata tools like the new ethnographic thesaurus, and as Chris noted recently in a SavageMinds blog post, we have more and more OA journals spanning the topical and international diversity of world anthropology.

Will all this stuff somehow function better if it is centralized and put under the control of the home office?

Chris Kelty has recently published a book that is also available online. He compares the internet with a bookstore:

The Open Access argument is simply that making the book available on line was in my interest, because it will mean that it will be easy to find, easy to cite, and easy to use in classes.

But it might also be in Duke’s interest; I made the argument that people are more likely to buy the paper book if they can get a look at the book in its entirety digitally (Harper Collins buys this argument, and has just begun a similar experiment)

I told Duke to think of the website as a bookstore with a huge number of potential visitors, and the on-line version as the browseable version of the book. If a million people download my book, but only 1 percent of them then go on to buy a copy, Duke will still be selling far more copies then they ever dreamed. And what if I sell 5 percent? I’ll be a superstar!

>> read the whole article

>> blog of this publication

UPDATE See also Owen Wiltshire’s comments

SEE ALSO:

AAA: “Open access no realistic option”

American Anthropological Association opposes Open Access to Journal Articles

Open Access: “The American Anthropological Association reminds me of the recording industry”

For Open Access: “The pay-for-content model has never been successful”

Danah Boyd on Open Access: “Boycott locked-down journals”

Is it time to boycott SAGE?

The unacknowledged convergence of open source, open access, and open science

Why were they doing this work just to give it away for free? Thesis on Ubuntu Linux hackers

Plans to study anthropological online communities and Open Access movement

2006 - The Year of Open Access Anthropology?