Open Access Anthropology

Scholarly communication reformers and critics recently learned of another way in which the for-profit, toll access journal system has become significantly corrupted when media reports revealed that the giant publishing firm Elsevier has been publishing fake medical journals at the behest of large pharmaceutical firms including Merck. While those concerned with the corporate enclosure of journal publishing in anthropology and neighboring fields usually focus attention on Wiley-Blackwell, Routledge and other firms with large and growing footprints in these fields, it is worth noting in connection with the fake journal episode that a number of anthropology titles are on Elsevier’s +/-2000 journal list. There may be more titles from anthropology and neighboring areas, but I identify the following:

l’Anthropologie
Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia
Evolution and Human Behavior
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology
Journal of Archaeological Science
Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts

I am sure that these journals are edited by excellent colleagues and are contributed to by first-rate scholars, but I would not want to be associated with a journal published by Elsevier. The reasons are multiple but they now include a documented (and acknowledged) history of misleading publishing activity in the service of big drug companies and not in the service of scholarly integrity.

For the background on the fake journal story, see here and search on “Elsevier” at Open Access News.

Tags: Economic Issues · Elsevier · Fraud · Integrity · Legal IssuesNo Comments.

There is way more relevant news from the world of scholarly communications than any of us can keep up with.  Thankfully Open Access News does an amazing job of flagging tons of important items for our consideration. A recent bit of news that I was especially glad to see was the pro-OA statement offered by the directors of ten North American university presses.  These presses affirmed a collaborative, not-for-profit, public-interest position that contrasts strongly with that of the AAP and the AAUP.

I do not know all of these presses equally well, but I would note that the University Press of Florida and the University of Michigan Press have important histories in anthropology monograph publishing and that Wayne State University Press is crucial to folklore studies. The University Press of New England (via Wesleyan University Press) is central in ethnomusicology. This statement is one more reason for scholars to think favorably about these presses when looking for publishing partners.

Thank you University Press of Florida, University of Akron Press, University Press of New England, Athabasca University Press, Wayne State University Press, University of Calgary Press, The University of Michigan Press, The Rockefeller University Press, Penn State University, and University of Massachusetts Press.

PS: Where does your University Press stand?

UPDATE:  See the Inside Higher Education story here.

Tags: Announcements · Links · OA Journal News · OA Journals · Openness · SHERPA "Green" · University Presses1 Comment

As we were celebrating on May first this year our first  Open Access Anthropology Day, Lorenz made a great contribution by gathering many, if not all, the updated OAA Journals. You can read the post, which Lorenz wrote here, and if you would like to add other OAAJ, which are not listed in the page that he created, please leave him a comment under his post.  Interestingly, the languages that are being used in these journals are various: English, German, Multilingual, Scandinavian, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Polish, and French. Looking forward to see more other languages.

I encourage you to bookmark this valuable page. It will save a lot of your time searching for OAA journals since the page is updated. Also, it will be a great idea if professors encourage their students to search OAAJ and use them in their class papers. Professors are encouraged to use the Open Access Anthropology Journals to create materials for their classes. Students as well can encourage their professors to use the materials in OAA journals to prepare for the class readings. Thanks Lorenz.

Tags: Announcements · OA JournalsNo Comments.

A new birth of an OAA Journal is a great contribution that Angels made on Open Access Anthropology Day 2009

As Angels wrote,

I applied for ISSN on Open Access Anthropology Day, as a way to mark the day, and I got a response from the ISSN team the next morning.

The outcome of this step was the Journal of Anthropology Reviews: Dissent and Cultural Politics. Its first issue will be available in February 2010. And, it will be published twice a year in February and October. The aim of the journal as stated on its homepage is

to produce an open access anthropology review aimed at the academic community at large that analyses responses to cultural politics with reflective, incisive articles in textual and non-textual formats.

Also, the description of the journal as written on its homepage goes as following

Dissent and Cultural Politics is an european and international, open access anthropology journal that analyses how cultural innovation, transnational and political issues underpin the character of relationality of global issues. In the analysis of cultural politics, the journal is interested in social responses to the future of culture in the
public domain in the age of globalisation -and within the altermodern period that is emerging after postmodernity. The reviews aim to look at the political intersections between culture and globalisation, and specifically, the way in which human relations are mediated through political voice and cultural innovation.The journal is inclusive of all types of submissions, working papers, research papers, pre peer-reviewed and reviewed publications, multimedia (including audio, video) and internet based data. The journal will be part of open access anthropology journals structured within a mediated website and forums.

You can check Angels post here and the journal’s homepage here

Tags: OA Journal News · OA JournalsNo Comments.

As I posted previously here, In the 1st of May 2009, we will be celebrating the first Open Access Anthropology Day. Anthropologists, in this day, show their support to Open Access Anthropology. Open Access Anthropology is interested in creating open access alternatives to anthropological publications by promoting Open Access Anthropology Journals. In addition, at this day we encourage you to promote further the notion of self-archiving among your colleagues. If you would like to be an active member in this event, here are some suggestions:

How to Participate in Open Access Anthropology Day

1- You can join the event over Blogger Unite, which it would not consume a minute from your time

2- Let others in our field learn about Open Access Anthropology Day by sharing with them this post via social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, etc

3- If you have a blog, you can spend some time to write a post at that day about any topic associated with Open Access Anthropology

4- Professors can discuss topics related to Open Access Anthropology with their students at that day

5- Graduate and undergraduate students can discuss with their colleagues and professors the importance of Open Access Anthropology

6- You can share with us any open access publication of yours. You can leave its URL in the comment’s section below

7-  Also you can share with us your experience with Open Access Anthropology Journals either by writing a post about it in your blog, or share it with us here under the comment’s section

8- You can copy and paste into your blog’s text sidebar the HTML code of the event’s badge, which is posted in the Blog Unite as I am doing in my blog’s sidebar

9- I strongly encourage you to download the poster, which Kerim and Alex created promoting self-archiving , and email it to the members of your department. Also, you can print the poster out, if you wish, on a nice color printer and post it to the bulletin board of your department

Please feel free to let us know if you have further ideas, we are always open to new ones

To learn more about the importance of Open Access Anthropology and some related topics you can visit these posts:

Why Open Access?

Open Access Journal Publishing in Anthropology by Max

Stumped by AnthroSource by Kerim

A Short Summary of Recent Open Access News by Lorenz

Happy Open Access Anthropology Day

Tags: Announcements · Events4 Comments

In an arrangement similar to that characterizing the publication of Chris Kelty’s book Two Bits by Duke University Press, Columbia University Press is both selling a print edition of Ted Striphas’ new book The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control and is facilitating the author’s distribution of the book as a Creative Common’s licensed PDF download. Professor Striphas (a tallented colleague of mine here at Indiana University) has set up a site for the book (including a blog and access to the book) and also has a more general blog. Find the book site, particularly a post on the PDF arrangement, here.  Find his everyday blog here.

Thanks go to Columbia University Press for working to be part of the future of scholarly communications. Thanks as well to Professor Striphas for the extra effort that went into this arrangement.

Tags: Author Websites · Case studies · Economic Issues · Open texts · Openness · University Presses · WeblogsNo Comments.

From the PLOS website:

After the resounding success of our first ever Open Access Day in 2008, where we had nearly 130 participating organizations from almost 30 countries, we are pleased to announce that this year’s events will be scheduled during the week of 19-23 October 2009.

Why a week rather than a day? When we asked for feedback from the folks taking part last year, while they said that they had enjoyed the “event-in-a-box” approach, many of them found that cramming everything into one day was tricky (especially given international time differences) and that spreading activities over a week to suit their individual needs would be easier.

What is also particularly pleasing about choosing this week is that 19 October is PLoS Medicine’s fifth birthday so any planned community-led events to celebrate this important milestone can do double duty.

The organizing forces behind Open Access week remain unchanged from last year namely: PLoS, SPARC and Students for FreeCulture but we also wish to add a technology partner who could assist us with streaming live web coverage of round table discussions or talks from prominent advocates and post event delivery. So if you are reading this and you work in this field or have significant experience of it and want to join the team please email Donna Okubo (dokubo@plos.org).

We will be launching our Open Access Week 2009 site shortly but in the meantime, you can sign up here.

Tags: Events1 Comment

Planned Obsolescence has a post about the announcement “that the University of Michigan Press is being restructured as an academic unit housed under the University of Michigan Library,” noting that the interesting thing about this is the “transformation of the press from a revenue center to something more like a service organization within the institution.”

Tags: Case studies · University Presses1 Comment

I am obviously out of it, as I am only now hearing about it now, but I just saw the table of contents for the newest issue of TDR (The Drama Review), which devotes considerable attention to unpacking a rather dramatic instance of publisher-induced plagiarism (for profit) in the interdisciplinary field of Performance Studies. Regrettably, the material can only be found behind the pay wall of ProjectMuse or MIT Press-Journals (or in the pages of TDR), but here is an abstract for the section containing various sub-articles:

Tags: Economic Issues · Events · Legal Issues · Plagiarism · RoutledgeNo Comments.

Reposted from Savage Minds.

Important post from Change Congress over at Huffington Post:

You may have heard of Big Oil, but have you heard of “Big Paper”? We know, it sounds absurd, but check this out.

Right now, there’s a proposal in Congress to forbid the government from requiring scientists who receive taxpayer funds for medical research to publish their findings openly on the Internet.

This ban on “open access publishing” (which is currently required) would result in a lot of government-funded research being published exclusively in for-profit journals — inaccessible to the general public.

Why on earth would anyone propose this? A new report by transparency group MAPLight.org shows that sponsors of this bill — led by Rep. John Conyers — received twice as much money from the publishing industry as those on the relevant committee who are not sponsors.

This is exactly the kind of money-for-influence scheme that constantly happens behind our backs and erodes the public’s trust in government.

A notice from Change Congress’s Facebook page suggests action you can take. (Reproduced here after the jump.)

[Read more →]

Tags: Legal Issues · OpennessNo Comments.