Open Access Anthropology

Via John Postill’s Media/Anthropology  blog, a post about a new Open Access Repository for all the social sciences. “SSOAR [Social Science Open Access Repository] is geared towards a scholarly audience in the social sciences wishing to search quality-controlled content across disciplinary boundaries and to access documents directly and free of charge.” This is the first general Social Science OA repository we’ve found (hence our previous post on  EduPunk alternatives). I hope SSOAR succeeds, and that the other institutions (cough, cough, AAA, cough, cough) follow suit.

Tags: RepositoriesNo Comments.

Readers of the Open Access Anthropology blog might have an interest in an opinion essay that I (Jason Baird Jackson) wrote recently. In it, I lay out some modest steps  that scholars interested in changing the direction of scholarly communications might take. The focus is a plea to withdraw from working with commercial publishers. The essay can be found on my website here: http://wp.me/p6MUY-5r . Thanks!

Tags: Economic Issues · Ethical Failures · Integrity · Openness · Scholarly Societies · University Presses · WeblogsNo Comments.

Readers of Open Access Anthropology will want to check out the announcements for (and press coverage of) the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity that was just announced by Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT and Berkeley.

I just finished speaking to Inside Higher Education about it for a story that they will run tomorrow.  I had not yet read the “OA Compact” statement yet, which added to my nerves about weighing in on it (via a phone interview). I may or may not need to explain myself after the story runs.  Having now read the core documents, I can just state at this stage that I very much support open access and I believe in new kinds of university (college, museum, etc.) investments in it.  I believe that different ways of spending on scholarly communication can change the publishing landscape in good ways, including equitable ways.  My sense of the equities that matter here include not just equity between modes of publication but also social justice issues.  This new development could lead to good of many kinds, but my own preference would be for institutional investments at the journal (or journal program) level rather than at the article/author level.

This scheme will make the literature more accessible to readers, which is a wonderful thing, but in fields like anthropology and folklore studies, where authors can make very important contributions without being attached to major western research universities, it may increase barriers to authorship in unhelpful ways.  It may also, by handing private for-profit publishers a new business model and the cash payments to go with it, continue the current arrangement in which large commercial firms lay claim to ever larger amounts of the commonwealth–overtly in the form of university-paid page charges, and covertly in the form of research-derived IP (often publicly funded), uncompensated editorial work, uncompensated peer-review, unpaid-for office space, equipment, etc. and freely provided graduate assistant-based editorial staff support.

This announcement is big and dramatic.  As with the green OA mandates, it represents a step by some major universities to change the terms under which our publishing system works.  It is a major move for OA.  I like that.  I hope that it prompts renewed discussion of the many big issues at stake.

PS:  Thankfully the statement’s architects acknowledge that a minority of gold OA journals are author-pays journals (contra the AAA and its associates). If the scheme works, I suspect that most gold OA journals will move towards author-pays.  This is one place where I agree with several AAA-sanctioned voices.  The growth of author-pays models could really harm existing authors in anthropology and folklore studies and could make the inclusion of as-yet-unheard from voices that much more difficult.  If this is the path that we wind up taking toward gold OA, we will have to work really hard to build and fund a subsidy (or waiver) system sufficient for the inclusion of the vast range of people (=potential authors) who will not have access to institutional author-fee support.

Tags: Announcements · Economic Issues · OA Journal News · OA Journals · Openness2 Comments

A friend who is very involved in the leadership of the American Folklore Society  just shared with me a link to James Lappin’s very effective blog post “The Impact of the Web 2.0 World on the Records Management Society.”  While presented as a case study of information science/archives organizations in the UK, its arguments generalize amazingly well and provide valuable food for thought for all scholarly disciplines and societies–including those that the readers of this weblog care (or have given up caring) about.

Vis-a-vis the American Anthropological Association, the post provides a compliment to the arguments presented in a less immediately accessible way in “Anthropology of/in Circulation: The Future of Open Access and Scholarly Societies.”  (As a contributor to it) I am very proud of the later paper, but it represents a dialogue on a range of issues and features a diversity of voices with several overlapping sets of interests. Mr. Lappin’s essay is a single scholar’s view on the ways that scholarly societies should be confronting the challenges and opportunities of a world in which most of their members will have access to web 2.0 tools. His discussions of the growing irrelevance of scholarly societies in the 20th century mode and his case for a new mission for the scholarly society (amplifying member’s voices in public rather than as a provider of members-only benefits of decreasing value) connects especially well with the case that Chris Kelty was making in “Anthropology of/in Circulation.” He also provides and operationalizes a number of do-able  steps of a clear cut sort–a kind of emulate-able game plan that a society leadership would be foolish not to at least give thought to.

Tags: Case studies · Facebook · Links · Ning · Scholarly Societies · Twitter · Web 2.0 · Weblogs · YouTube · conferences · tools1 Comment

I think that this is the week’s big news in scholarly communications issues.  Its not open access, but it is not-for-profit. There is much that could be said.  Hopefully there will be some discussion among anthropologists, especially in light of the AAA’s experiences working with the University of California Press Journals program.  For myself, I will observe again that the Journal’s staff at California were amazing to work with as an editor.  Personal experience aside, it seems that the big question here relates to the meaning of this to ProjectMuse.  Read all about it below (and see the IHE story too):

PRESS RELEASE
EMBARGOED UNTIL AUGUST 13, 2009

A new collaboration emerges to improve access to scholarship for faculty, students, and librarians. University of California Press and JSTOR today announced a new effort to invest in a shared online platform and outreach services that promise to create a more seamless, rich online work environment for faculty and students, ease the burden on librarians of negotiating separate license agreements with a multitude of publishers and independent titles, and promote a more cost-effective publishing environment.

August 12, 2009 – Berkeley, CA and New York, NY – University of California Press, the not-for-profit publishing arm of the University of California and JSTOR, the preservation archive and research platform that is part of the not-for-profit ITHAKA, will work in partnership – and encourage others to join them – to make current and historical scholarly content available on a single, integrated platform, to provide a single point of purchase and access for librarians and end users around the world, and to ensure its long-term preservation.

Beginning in 2011, current content from all University of California Press published journals, including those from scholarly societies, will be hosted on a re-designed JSTOR platform. Faculty and students around the world will be able to access all licensed content on JSTOR – current issues, back issues, and a growing set of primary source materials from libraries – easily and seamlessly. JSTOR’s nearly 6,000 library participants worldwide will be able to license the Press’s current journals, either individually or as part of current issue collections, together with JSTOR back issue collections in a single transaction. [Read more →]

Tags: Announcements · Economic Issues · Ithaka/JSTOR · ProjectMuse · Scholarly Societies · University PressesNo Comments.

Tags: AAA OA Policy · Announcements · Case studies · Economic Issues · Events · OA Journals · Openness · Repositories · Scholarly Societies · conferencesNo Comments.

EduPunk, as I understand it, refers to scholars who, frustrated by the inferior tools offered by their universities, have embraced free online (i.e. “web 2.0″) social tools as a substitute. Much of the focus of EduPunk has been on teaching; for instance, using Google Groups instead of Blackboard. But I think Anthropologists should also think about Edupunk for Open Access archiving. Responses to Jason’s post make it clear that Anthropologists are sorely lacking in institutional repositories where they can store their work. As Peter Suber pointed out in his comment, if your university offers an institutional repository you should make use of it. But many of us are not so lucky.

There is, of course Mana’o, but as Jason pointed out, that has been off line for some time. It is possible that it will be resuscitated, but since it doesn’t look like the AAA is likely to offer a service which would compete with Anthrosource, I’d like to suggest that Anthropologists start looking at some of the Edupunk alternatives.

When I posted a query about this to the Open Access Anthropology Google Group, archaeologist Mike Smith pointed me to a great blog post he had already written by Digger on this topic:

So I did a little experiment. I fished out some conference papers I’ve given, a couple of journal articles, and a book. I posted them to four “put your stuff out there” locations online, all free:

Mendeley.com Mostly a reference management tool that lets you access your .pdfs from anywhere – especially helpful when I have references that overlap between work and personal. They do also have a Personal Profile page, where you can make your own work available as downloads for anyone. The site can be slow to load.

CiteULike Again, mostly a reference management tool, similar to Mendeley. You can make your papers available for download by anyone. I find it kinda clunky vs. Mendely, but have found a few references I didn’t otherwise know about.

Academia.edu Facebook for academics. With the ability to post papers for people to access, as well as posting research interests, joining groups of folks that share your interests, etc. Perk: you get email when someone searches on you or “follows” you, and you can see how many people have looked at your stuff. Note: it only -looks- like you need a university affiliation to be listed here. Scroll through, there is an “Independent Researcher” catagory.

SelectedWorks Strictly a portal to post your stuff and have it available. Folks can subscribe to get updates, but that’s about it for the acasocial framework. One perk: realtime reports about how many copies of your stuff have been downloaded. They also convert your .docs into .pdfs and index them.

Time passed. The results? Mendeley and CiteuLike, from what I can tell, did squat for me in the “making stuff available” department (though I’m sticking with Mendeley for managing references). Academia.edu – had a few folks peek at the papers; apparently there is a trickle of visitors coming in via Google, no Google Scholar links. I give it a meh.

The real winner here is SelectedWorks. I can see people are accessing and downloading my stuff. It is totally easy to update my site. And, time to Google Scholar for everything (book, journal articles, conference papers) = 1 month. Even though I didn’t provide full text for the book and one journal article, they’re now indexed in Google Scholar.

If your university has an account with SelectedWorks, it’s easy to get listed. But, you can be listed as an individual for free, it’s just not readily apparent. From their homepage, scroll to the bottom and click “Start a Site”. You will have to email them directly to get an access code (took < 1 day for me). That’s it. I found tweaking my abstracts to include words others might search for was helpful (Search Engine Optimization for scholarly papers, woot!), and the realtime download stats let me track that.

This is win-win, for writers (who get their stuff out there) and for researchers (who can find more stuff). It’s a little nerve-wracking to know that my stuff is being read, but I’m coping!

I am really impressed with SelectedWorks as well. I had forgotten that I’d signed up with an account some time ago. It took some time for them to get back to me, but as Mike Digger says, it is easy to sign up for a free account. Other options that Mike Digger didn’t mention include

• The Open Anthropology Cooperative has created its own repository in a wiki format.
• Scribd. Harvard UP has just begun selling 1000s of books via Scribd, using it as a digital publishing platform, including a few free titles as well. NYU and MIT Press are using it as well (although in different ways).
• Google Docs. They are improving their PDF capabilities, although it seems that one still needs to be logged in to Google Docs to read “public” PDFs.
• And a million file sharing tools such as Box.net, Mediafire, and Drop.io. Although these sites may not be as open to Google search results, you can store files there and link to them from your personal web page if you have one, or together with the OAC Repository wiki mentioned above.

There are certainly a lot of options out there now. But we also have to ask about the down side. What is lost when we post to an EduPunk archive instead of a proper institutional repository? For one thing, we loose a lot by not having proper metadata entered by a trained librarian, as was the case with Mana’o. And what about the legal issues? Open Access legal statements seem focused on personal websites and institutional repositories. There doesn’t seem to be language for something the kinds of services listed above… And, in his reply to my e-mail, Chris Kelty pointed out some other problems:

what is the eduPunk approach to archival persistence?  How would these tools allow for permanent findability and a certain sense that one can be sure it will stay available for a long time?  DOI numbers require an institutional home… COiNs data are easy to add to a blog post… Zotero can find things with this data… so maybe part of the blog post should be best practices for eduPunk  future-proofing…

All important questions to ask. I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments!

UPDATE: Changed author of blog post to Digger as per comments.

Tags: Mana'o project · Self-Archiving · tools6 Comments

Not everyone is employed at an institution that has established an stable, standard institutional repository where manuscripts, working papers, white papers, and green OA articles can be deposited. As discusussed on the Open Access Anthropology list, the Mana’o Project (a provisional subject repository for anthropology) is offline, for the time being at least. While discussions aimed at establishing an anthropology subject repository on firm footing continue, it might be good to inventory known repositories in which anthropologists might wish place their work.  Two that I know about have a policy orientation–IssueLab and Policy Archive. Another one of possible interest is the Digital Library of the Commons, a repository for scholarship dealing with commons, common-pool resources, and common property issues.  If you know of other repositories into which scholars in anthropology and neighboring fields could place their work, please leave a comment or link.

Tags: Mana'o project · Repositories · SHERPA "Green" · Self-Archiving · papers5 Comments

Readers of the weblog will probably want to check out the following story in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  “Humanities Journals Cost Much More to Publish Than Science Periodicals.”  It is available for just a few days before the toll gate closes.  Here is paragraph 1.

It costs more than three times as much to publish an article in a humanities or social-science journal as it does to publish one in a science, technical, or medical, or STM, journal, and the prevailing model used by many publishers of STM journals will not work for their humanities and social-sciences counterparts. Those are some of the eye-opening conclusions released today in a report on an in-depth study of eight flagship journals in the humanities and social sciences.

Find the whole article here:
http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=XGjPVWFxjhprCnyFp2ZdnDwvTVGHyyZm

Tags: AAA OA Policy · Announcements · Economic Issues · Scholarly SocietiesNo Comments.

Inside Higher Education reports today on two developments in social science publishing centered on the large commercial publisher Sage.  In the story available here, we learn that the American Sociological Association, has followed the lead of the AAA and foresaken self-publishing its journals portfolio in lieu of a co-publishing agreement with Sage. This would have been a straight forward story of celebration or mourning (depending on where you stand), were it not co-occuring with the other storyline presented in the IHE story.  A fully Saged owned political science journal–Political Theory–is at the center of a controversy related to a flubbed firing/hiring/replacing of the journal’s editor.  The episode revealed for many political scientists the conflicts built into corporate owned or controlled journals and showed again the misallignment of commercial and scholarly values.  Read all about it and think twice when Sage calls and asks you to take up an editorship.  Thanks IHE.

(Forget open access.  Why again are we are dismantling the university press system and selling/giving away the pieces to these folks?)

Tags: Economic Issues · Ethical Failures · Integrity · Political Science · Sage · Scholarly Societies · SociologyNo Comments.