Open Access Anthropology

While my university (Indiana University) now has a robust institutional repository (IUScholarWorks: Repository), it is also the home to an important subject repository called The Digital Library of the Commons. When these matters were new to me (in late 2004) I posted my introductory remarks from a symposium that I had organized (Contesting Culture as Property) in the Digital Library of the Commons. Commons and common pool resource issues were central to the course out of which the symposium arose and this all fit together and made sense to me, even though at the time I did not know as much as I would come to know about OA issues (not that I am an expert now, or anything). I am telling this story just to point to a new development (new for me, at least).

I have just discovered that my 6 page PDF manuscript, which was made available for free to all comers via the repository, can now be purchased as an “e-book” for $2.99 from a firm that is using ABEBooks.com for this purpose. (Find it, but don’t purchase it, here.)

How common are such situations? For better or worse, the 2004 me marked the paper clearly with a dated (c) mark. Even if I had used a (cc) license (as I surely would have done had I posted it more recently), this still would not have been cool. I hate to think that I will need to buy my paper in order to get a clearer idea who is behind this and what exactly they are doing.

[DLC records clearly state: "This is an open-access digital library and archive. Copyright for DLC documents is retained by the authors. Use and distribution by you is subject to citation of the original source."]

My paper is too minor to worry about, but I wonder if anyone has thoughts on this phenomena more generally?

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