Open Access Anthropology

[Kerim Friedman]

Please circulate widely.

Open Access and the AAA

Scholarly societies are in crisis, and the AAA is among them.
Dwindling revenues from sales of AAA Journals are among the causes,
and if we don't staunch the bleeding now, we are warned, there will be
nothing left to give.

How has the AAA gotten to a point where its solvency seems to be based
solely on the sales of our scholarly work? Work that has already been
paid for by public and private granting agencies which we pay
registration fees to present at conferences organized by the scholarly
society we pay memebrship fees to join? Why must we also charge our
readers?

Recently, the AAA publicly voiced its opposition to Federal
Legislation that would require federally funded research to be freely
available to the people who paid for it: citizens. This public
opposition is clearly not in the interest of AAA members -- and the
AnthroSource Steering Committee has publicly said as much, proposing a
range of initiatives to make our collective work more accessible. For
this criticism, the ASSC was dissolved.

Clearly, something needs to change.

1) we need a solid open access policy to make anthropological research
widely available;

2) we need a more transparent financial arrangement between the
association and its members;

3) we need a form of financial sustainability that does not compromise
our ability to disseminate our research.

We invite the sections and their members to start thinking creatively
about the solution to these problems. Digital publishing gives us the
technology to make our work widely available, so let's use it! Our
colleagues in the sciences and social sciences have already begun the
experiment, and we should critically examine their successes and
failures.

We also need to think hard and think together about how to move the
AAA away from the current 'weapons of mass destruction' business plan,
which seeks profits by exploiting copyrighted scholarly work. If the
model worked, would the publishing program be losing money?

What is Open Access?

Open Access is online, freely available, peer-reviewed research. It is
licensed in such a way that it protects the rights of the author, but
allows the work to circulate as freely as possible. It is fully
compatible with peer-review and publication in scholarly journals, and
there are increasingly a large number of fields whose most prestigious
journals have adopted open access policies.

Although OA literature is less expensive to produce than
conventionally published literature, no one seriously believes that it
is costless. The goal of Open Access is not to pursue some utopian
vision where the bottom line doen't matter. Quite the opposite -- we
believe that there are better ways to pay the bills.

The stakes here are not just financial. Open Access Anthropology
speaks to the core ethical concerns of anthropology: a conviction that
researchers have a right to know and be known and, above all, that
people everywhere have a story that deserves to be told. How can
anthropologists work collaboratively with people who are unlikely to
have free access to the same body of knowledge that we do? How can
scholars in related (and distant) fields discover our work if it is
restricted only to a paying membership?

Would you like to learn more?

There will be an informal meeting to discuss Open Access on Saturday
the 18th at noon at Gordon Biersch, 33 E. Santa Clara Street (between
First and Second).

In the mean time, there are various ways you can be involved. Learn
about the issue by visiting

http://openaccessanthropology.org

There is also an Open Access email list that you can join if you want
to talk about these issues, or if you simply want to hear what other
people are saying. Just go to

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/open-access-anthropology/

And press the "join this group" link on the right hand side of the page.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Please support us by signing our letter. You can see the list of
current signatories here:

http://openaccessanthropology.org/wiki/Signatures