Open Access Anthropology

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The video archive version of the recent Association for Research Libraries (ARL) webcast on “Reaching Out to Leaders of Scholarly Societies at Research Institutions” to which I contributed is now available online.  It can be gotten to for free, all that is required is signing in for ARL headcounting purposes.  Watching it in this way [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]