Open Access Anthropology

Thanks to everyone who has found these discussions of OA in folklore studies of interest, especially those who have posted links to them or who have written with encouraging comments. In this final post, which I will try to keep brief, I will take the final leg of my proposed journey and mention new (and not so new) OA start-ups in folklore studies.

Perhaps the best North American-based example is Cultural Analysis, which I mentioned in the previous post. If one checks the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and similar sources, one can find other born digital, born open folklore and ethnology journals. As others have noted, new OA journals, across the disciplines, are particularly appealing to scholars working in other national and regional contexts. Among folklore journals that can be pointed to in this context are Elore published in Helsinki, Finland and Folklore, published in Tartu, Estonia. The former journal’s contents are mainly in Finnish, while the later publishes in English. According to its website, Folklore (not to be confused with the British TA journal of the same name) has been published online since 1996. Estonia and Finland have very long histories of robust folklore scholarship and they have always been major centers of disciplinary activity internationally, thus it is not surprising that scholars there would have taken a lead in the development of open, digital journals for the field.

For a several disciplines, The Bryn Mawr Classical Review, which was begun in 1990 and is based on the circulation of as-they-are-ready emailed book reviews, has provided a model for similar publication projects. In folklore studies, a email-based review service, with a searchable online database of content, was founded by my colleagues at Indiana University not long ago. Called the Journal of Folklore Research Reviews (JFRR for short), the project is based on the inspiration of The Bryn Mawr Classical Review and is an open access spin off of our house journal The Journal of Folklore Research (published in a conventional partnership with Indiana University Press). As a free service to the whole of folklore studies, the uptake on JFRR has been remarkable. Colleagues across the field really seem to value the bite-sized format of one review at a time delivered right to the email box.

It is a publication that spans folklore and anthropology, but I can note here the journal that colleagues and I founded a year ago–Museum Anthropology Review. Information on MAR and its move–announced publicly just last week–to a publishing partnership with the Indiana University Libraries can be found elsewhere on the web (see here, here, and here). I mention it in this context because my engagement with, and investigations of, open access publishing in folklore and anthropology stem largely from my experiences founding it.

My experiences with Museum Anthropology Review suggest to me that additional worthwhile OA folklore journals will likely be established in coming years. The process is relatively easy and inexpensive, given available tools. My reading of the landscape in folklore, anthropology and neighboring fields indicates that the house journal tradition may already being revived in the new digital context. An example that comes to mind here is Museum and Society, a journal launched in 2003 and centered on the Department of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester.

I want to conclude by returning to a point that I raised in my initial post. While sharing a great deal of common ground and common history, folklore studies and anthropology pose a contrast relative to OA publishing. In anthropology there is significant activism relative to OA and clear sense of a debate about the future to be engaged in. Developments in the American Anthropological Association’s publications program (discussed on Savage Minds and in the pages of higher education periodicals) have been a catalyst for these conversations. By contrast, far fewer folklorists are aware of such debates yet, because of the social organization and political economy of their field, OA is much less of a major transformation in the means of doing business for folklore studies. Barriers to achieving OA are much lower, but the longer term values that OA connects up with are also central to many folklorists sense of purpose.

This is perhaps clearest for the domain known as “public folklore.” Many U.S. folklorists work in the public sector, outside academia. Public folklore work centers on community-based culture work, including activities such as documenting the creative lives of traditional artists, developing public programs (festivals, exhibitions, concerts, presentations, demonstrations, etc.), and implementing public grant and curriculum initiatives. Public folklore programs, which are generally not-for-profits or part of state or local governments, have long sought the most cost effective means available by which to bring their research–both as documentation and as curated products–to the attention of various stakeholders, including students, source communities, policy makers and the general public. This goal has roots in the long term values of folklore studies in general, but it is also a very practical strategy at several levels, from the contingencies of project management through to the politics of program funding. The principles of open access, and even of open data, whether recognized as such or not, seem like second nature to many folklorists. Like other kinds of scholars in public practice, public folklorists often lack the time and incentive to prioritize the scholarly article or monograph relative to more immediate and historically more accessible genres of scholarly production–the white paper, the lesson plan, the event program, the museum exhibition, the briefing for policy makers, the conference proceeding. Like workers in neighboring fields, public folklorists have for many years grown accustomed of producing works in formats such as PDF and making these available via CD-ROM and internet download. Viewed from the perspective of public folklore work, OA in folklore studies predates the narrower, more strictly journal-like projects that I have been discussing.

Despite the advantages that I have highlighted, folklore studies does face some of the same limitations found in anthropology. Several major journals are entangled in the usual web of financial considerations. Still, most of these are published in partnership with not-for-profit university presses who are also strongly invested in the health of the field. As in anthropology, there is great variance among folklorists in terms of technical sophistication, in terms of technical access, and with respect to relative willingness to engage with new media. Folklorists, after all, have a longterm intellectual commitment to engaging with, and sometimes celebrating, time tested (sometimes moribund) technologies and of maintaining respect for those who prefer not to jump on bandwagons.

It will be interesting to see where OA projects go in folklore studies and to see what lessons other disciplines will offer the field.

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