[Linganth] Cultural Anthropology Essay on Open access

Thu Jul 1 08:59:16 UTC 2021

I wanted to make sure that everyone saw this important article posted on
Cultural Anthropology, which I’ve copied in full below. (I am not one of
the authors, but am very happy to see this discussion happening.) - kerim

Opening Access to AAA’s Publishing Future
<https://culanth.org/fieldsights/opening-access-to-aaas-publishing-future>

By Sarah Besky, Ilana Gershon, Alex Nading, Christopher Nelson, Katie
Nelson, Heather Paxson, and Brad Weiss

June 30, 2021

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) publishing contract with
Wiley comes to term in 2022. In light of this pressing deadline, several
journal editors and section presidents have been meeting to uncover the
common ground in our commitments and to determine what collective action
might keep AAA’s expression of values front and center in our publishing
practices and decisions.

We share AAA’s commitment to five “bedrock values” for our publishing
program: quality, breadth, sustainability, access, and equity. Open access
(OA) can be compatible with all five values, and should be a strategy that
AAA considers deliberatively. We also advocate that in this moment of
transition, AAA takes stock of ways in which all our interactions around
publishing can become more democratic. We want more transparency around the
publishing contracts and valuations that govern sections’ relative
capacities. We want more input from editors as a collective in publishing
decisions. And we want equitable labor practices that benefit our community.

We know from the 2020 AAA Editors Survey that there’s wide interest in and
strong support for OA across AAA sections and journals. In June 2021, we
carried out our own survey of twenty-seven journal editors and publishing
section leaders, representing at least twenty-two AAA sections. We found
that respondents had disparate understandings of what OA is and what it
means for authors and journals. Nonetheless, 9 out of 24 respondents (37.5
percent) indicated that “if the AAA decides to renew its (previously
5-year) contract with Wiley and postpones discussion of Open Access
publishing,” then “Yes,” their journal would “be interested in pursuing
alternative means of going OA in the next year or so,” with another 13 (54
percent) indicating openness to the possibility (“Maybe”). Only 2 said
“No.” We recognize that the questions OA raises about funding and revenue
are significant. We further believe that once one learns more about the
current academic publishing and OA landscape, these concerns are no longer
as daunting.

In 2014, AAA granted the Society for Cultural Anthropology the opportunity
to self-publish *Cultural Anthropology*
<https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca> as an OA journal
<https://culanth.org/fieldsights/open-access-a-collective-ecology-for-aaa-publishing-in-the-digital-age>.
*Cultural Anthropology*’s OA publishing has been funded by a combination of
membership dues, dwindling Wiley royalties, fundraising, grant writing, and
in-kind contributions from editors’ home institutions. It is important to
emphasize that *Cultural Anthropology* does *not* ask authors to pay
article processing charges (APCs), although these have become common to
some OA publishing models (including Wiley’s). OA does not equate to APCs.
With seven years of OA experience, the results are in: the quality and
breadth of *Cultural Anthropology*’s submissions and the impact and global
reach of its published volumes have benefited from its free and open
accessibility. Now is the time for AAA to safeguard and build on the
success of its own OA “experiment” by creating new economies of scale and
building new publishing infrastructures to support the OA publishing of its
entire portfolio in a financially sustainable way. Consulting with partners
like Libraria <https://libraria.cc/>, SPARC <https://sparcopen.org/>,
and Knowledge
Unlatched <https://knowledgeunlatched.org/> can help the AAA navigate the
complexities of OA without charging onerous fees to authors.

Let us take up the five bedrock values in turn to demonstrate how each can
be realized through OA publishing.
Quality

Moving an established journal to OA publishing does not tarnish the title’s
reputation, nor does the shift diminish its scholarly or production
quality. Quite the opposite, as the AAA’s own experiment with OA publishing
demonstrates.

As one measure of quality, we submit *Cultural Anthropology*’s impact
factor. In 2019, *Cultural Anthropology*’s five-year journal impact
factor—spanning the first five years of being OA—was 3.648. The one-year
2019 impact factor was 3.554. These figures put *Cultural Anthropology’_s
impact factor first among journals in the AAA portfolio, and second only to
the _Journal of Peasant Studies* among journals categorized as
anthropology. *Cultural Anthropology*’s h5-index is 30. This places *Cultural
Anthropology* fifth among all indexed anthropology journals and, again,
first among journals in the AAA portfolio. Submissions to *Cultural
Anthropology*, too, are both increasing in number and expanding in global
reach since going OA. The journal’s 2020 acceptance rate was 10.8 percent.

Yet what truly ensures the quality of AAA journals is the time-consuming
work of AAA members—as authors, editors, reviewers, and production team
members. This is the kind of labor that active scholars and students,
rather than publishing companies, are best positioned to carry out. Under
our current model, many who do this work are underpaid or are volunteers.
The scholarly quality that they produce translates directly into profits
for our publishing partner as well as AAA. Yet Wiley does not properly
support our colleagues in their efforts to create respected and polished
scholarly work.

As both the 2020 AAA Editors’ Survey and our own poll of publishing
sections indicates, our current production arrangement with Wiley has
actually created more work for our publishing colleagues. Evidence suggests
that quality control is actually at its worst in the typesetting and
proofing stages—those parts of the workflow that are, for most journals at
least, outsourced by Wiley to contractors. Publishing delays and errors
have been caused by turnover of personnel, misunderstandings about the
design and purpose of journal contents, and unwieldy digital interfaces. In
most cases, student managing editors and production assistants do not get
paid overtime to correct these errors. In some cases, volunteer editors
must devote even more of their time to correcting them. Given this, Wiley’s
recent push for even faster turnaround of content and even less oversight
over the final proofs of our work does not seem to be conducive to higher
quality. An OA model can allow journals to have control of the entire
production process, ensuring a consistent focus on fairness and quality
from start to finish.
Breadth

We share AAA’s commitment to supporting a topically, methodologically, and
stylistically broad portfolio of journals. That said, the breadth that we
value might only be maintained if we recognize that a “one-size-fits-all”
model may no longer be feasible. Considering that Wiley has already
announced its intentions to handle each journal differently, AAA should
actively consider “unbundling” the portfolio and pursuing a two-strand
approach to publishing the breadth of its journals, whether working with
one or two publishing partners (including the possibility of a library
publisher or a AAA-publishing model for smaller journals). Wiley’s current
pricing structure for library subscriptions
<https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1p7RSGIPvd45MSCwVb0DtW-DHg9SyQoPgp_GlEuVLRB4/edit?usp=sharing>
already indicates that the portfolio is unbundled for many users who aren’t
AAA members. The disaggregation we propose may permit journals that are not
well served by the irregularities of Wiley’s production to seek an
alternative (perhaps a collective and open one
<https://culanth.org/fieldsights/why-an-open-access-publishing-cooperative-can-work-a-proposal-for-the-aaas-journal-portfolio>),
while allowing those journals that still see greater benefit with a
commercial publisher to maintain this relationship. Moreover, we note that
an AnthroSource-like, integrated search of journals could be built across
content management systems, allowing AAA journals to retain their scholarly
integration in the association as a whole.
Sustainability

When we talk about financing OA, we should recognize that the expenses to
manage and produce a journal, based on volunteer editorial and reviewer
labor, are relatively minimal.

Some are concerned that OA is unappealing because it cannot generate the
profits that for-profit publishing generates. But this is not a flaw of OA.
We can and should ask OA publishing to generate a financial *surplus* to
ensure its economic sustainability. However, surplus is not the same as
ever-increasing profit. We ask AAA to evaluate OA models on the principle
of *sufficiency*, not capitalist profit, and to pursue creative means of
increasing revenue from other sources, be it membership, conferences
(remote as well as in-person), and other streams.

We would also like to emphasize that talk of sustainability in AAA’s
publishing program should make a priority of paying editorial and
production staff a living wage with full benefits, and providing
opportunities for professional development and career advancement,
including for graduate students. We do not think that a viable solution to
increasing production costs is outsourcing publication to temporary or
contract workers. We also don’t want more fissured workplaces.

If it becomes necessary to streamline copy editing and editorial management
across the journals, it is essential that editors and publishing sections
participate actively in that restructuring. Decisions about the publishing
workflow should be made in a democratic and transparent way. Opportunities
for students should remain. Any shifts in the production process should be
to the benefit of all the journals in the portfolio and should have the
full buy-in of all their constituent sections. In short, we would like to
see greater participatory representation in the AAA publishing decisions.
Sustainability can only be achieved with democratic and inclusive values.
Access

APC-based models of OA, and for-profit publishing in general, reduce access
for readers and authors outside of the AAA, outside of normative
tenure-track jobs, and outside the United States. For us, OA means more
than simply “free” content. It means a publishing environment in which any
scholar, no matter their nationality or institutional affiliation, feels
encouraged to share their work. As one of the world’s largest organizations
of professional anthropologists, we should be doing all we can to create
such an environment.

We are cognizant that membership is going down. So too are jobs for
anthropologists in universities with library access. This is the time to
reassess our knowledge sharing and dissemination practices. This is a time
to use our publishing platform as a means of committing to our shared
values of equity, inclusion, transparency, and democratic participation.
These goals are achievable—and sustainable—within a publication program
that is committed to quality scholarship and celebrating the breadth of the
discipline of anthropology as well.

Again, we can look at the evidence from *Cultural Anthropology*’s
experience with OA. The expected reduction in downloads from
AnthroSource—20,000 over the past two years—has been more than made up, in
numbers, by OA. In the seven-and-a-half years since the journal went OA in
2014, *Cultural Anthropology* articles have been downloaded from its OA
site 340,929 times as of June 2021. Moreover, two-thirds of the
traffic to *Cultural
Anthropology*’s OA site comes from outside the United States. In addition,
*Fieldsights*, the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s non-journal,
short-form publication, received 783,679 page views over the past year
alone. Obviously, this sort of readership is not factored into Wiley’s
calculations of *Cultural Anthropology*’s “value.” We would argue that it
represents significant social and academic capital for *Cultural
Anthropology* authors, the AAA, and the discipline more broadly. All of
this is lost in a model of value that relies entirely on calculations of
profitability.
Equity

To us, equity means two related things: (1) ensuring fair, impartial
treatment of authors, editors, and readers; and (2) recognizing the value
of the work each of us puts into the AAA’s publishing mission. Discussions
about the future of AAA publishing are happening late. We ask for a way
forward that not only opens publishing but opens dialogue between the
administration and the membership. This is a member-based organization, and
in discussions around publishing contracts, it often feels that this is not
the case. Conversations in the last few weeks have brought up opacity with
regards to the details of the Wiley contract including the pricing of
journal titles, the sources and algorithms that generate revenue, and what
appears to be a journal-by-journal siloing of communication between the
editors and the administration. The lack of transparency appears to be used
to discipline editors and journals in ways that are not contributing to the
democratic principles by which we want to govern ourselves.

To address this, we wish to repeat a call for democratic participation and
increased transparency. These are key elements of equity. Any contract
signed on behalf of our journals needs to be available to journal editors
upon request. We want an end to discussions about publishing that are only
held on a journal-by-journal basis. This limits the open flow of ideas that
we think could lead to a better outcome for everyone. In this time of
crisis in the academy, in the discipline, and in this organization, we need
to recommit to openness, equity, and inclusion.

We would like to close by reiterating that when we say “we support OA,” we
mean a model of OA publishing that does not rely on APCs. Instead, we
advocate for a process in which all of the stakeholders can be fully
informed about the various models of OA that exist (from APCs, to library
publishing, to subscribe to open
<https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/leap.1262>, and beyond).
The best way to inform ourselves is to create spaces in which we can
exchange ideas, discuss models, and learn from one another about what our
journals’ needs really are. We would like more participatory democracy in
this decision and in the future as AAA continues to respond to a changing
publishing landscape.

June 30, 2021

Sarah Besky, President, Society for the Anthropology of Work

Ilana Gershon, President-Elect, Association for Political and Legal
Anthropology

Alex Nading, Editor, *Medical Anthropology Quarterly*

Christopher Nelson, Editorial Collective, *Cultural Anthropology*

Katie Nelson, Communications Director, General Anthropology Division

Heather Paxson, Editorial Collective, *Cultural Anthropology*

Brad Weiss, Editorial Collective, *Cultural Anthropology*
-- 

P. Kerim Friedman 傅可恩

http://kerim.oxus.net/

Professor, Dept. of Ethnic Relations & Cultures

College of Indigenous Studies

National Dong Hwa University, TAIWAN

國立東華大學原住民民族學院

族群關係與文化學系教授
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