The journals published by individual sections of the AAA are handled by U.C. Press, which has this to say about open access repositories:
In response to the evolving nature of scholarly exchange and collaboration, University of California Press now allows its authors to post preprints and postprints on authors’ personal websites, on discipline-specific servers of preprints and/or postprints, and within institutional repositories.
This is great news, and Open Access Anthropology will be encouraging authors to make use of these rights as well as providing education and resources to facilitate this process.
However, not all anthropology journals are handled by U.C. Press, and so you may need to negotiate these rights when you sign a contract for your next article. Fortunately, SPARC has put together “Author Rights – an educational initiative that informs faculty across all disciplines about how to use the SPARC Author Addendum to secure their rights as authors of journal articles.” This should make it easy to explain exactly what you want and to ensure that you use the proper language to secure those rights in your contract.
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That’s pretty cool that the U.C. Press is doing that. It is very rational and I wonder how many more people will now consider publishing to the U.S. Press because they have more rights and freedoms with their work.
I wonder if “discipline-specific servers of preprints and/or postprints” could ever be sponsored by the AAA? That is, after some specified period of time, articles from AAA journals could be made freely available via a link off of AnthroSource? This probably won’t work right away, given AAA’s and UC Press’s current business models, but is perhaps worth discussing.
There are other professional societies that have released their content openly after an embargo period (two to six months? it varies), and suffered no significant decline in subscriptions. These are in the physical sciences, where the timeliness of the publication is considered quite significant. That is, new articles are taken as more valuable than older ones. Anthropology scholarship might be relevant for a longer period (or, to put it another way, less immediately “necessary” upon publication). The consequence might be that AAA subscriptions would erode substantially — if we know we will have access to all articles eventually and for the indefinite future, how many of us would subscribe to the journal (or join the association?)
The counter to this is that if scholars want to support open access to their work they may find that the best way to do this is through their societies… working to fund their activities differently from today’s business model, but recognizing the need for a reliable stream of revenue to keep journals and other services afloat.
Exactly. That is why we are going ahead without them. Perhaps they will then feel the pressure to step in and do something …
The problem is that subscriptions are hurting already. The question is how best to fix the problem. AnthroSource is already hurting subscriptions, without necessarily offering much in return.