I just finished speaking to Inside Higher Education about it for a story that they will run tomorrow.  I had not yet read the “OA Compact” statement yet, which added to my nerves about weighing in on it (via a phone interview). I may or may not need to explain myself after the story runs.  Having now read the core documents, I can just state at this stage that I very much support open access and I believe in new kinds of university (college, museum, etc.) investments in it.  I believe that different ways of spending on scholarly communication can change the publishing landscape in good ways, including equitable ways.  My sense of the equities that matter here include not just equity between modes of publication but also social justice issues.  This new development could lead to good of many kinds, but my own preference would be for institutional investments at the journal (or journal program) level rather than at the article/author level.

This scheme will make the literature more accessible to readers, which is a wonderful thing, but in fields like anthropology and folklore studies, where authors can make very important contributions without being attached to major western research universities, it may increase barriers to authorship in unhelpful ways.  It may also, by handing private for-profit publishers a new business model and the cash payments to go with it, continue the current arrangement in which large commercial firms lay claim to ever larger amounts of the commonwealth–overtly in the form of university-paid page charges, and covertly in the form of research-derived IP (often publicly funded), uncompensated editorial work, uncompensated peer-review, unpaid-for office space, equipment, etc. and freely provided graduate assistant-based editorial staff support.

This announcement is big and dramatic.  As with the green OA mandates, it represents a step by some major universities to change the terms under which our publishing system works.  It is a major move for OA.  I like that.  I hope that it prompts renewed discussion of the many big issues at stake.

PS:  Thankfully the statement’s architects acknowledge that a minority of gold OA journals are author-pays journals (contra the AAA and its associates). If the scheme works, I suspect that most gold OA journals will move towards author-pays.  This is one place where I agree with several AAA-sanctioned voices.  The growth of author-pays models could really harm existing authors in anthropology and folklore studies and could make the inclusion of as-yet-unheard from voices that much more difficult.  If this is the path that we wind up taking toward gold OA, we will have to work really hard to build and fund a subsidy (or waiver) system sufficient for the inclusion of the vast range of people (=potential authors) who will not have access to institutional author-fee support.

PRESS RELEASE
EMBARGOED UNTIL AUGUST 13, 2009

A new collaboration emerges to improve access to scholarship for faculty, students, and librarians. University of California Press and JSTOR today announced a new effort to invest in a shared online platform and outreach services that promise to create a more seamless, rich online work environment for faculty and students, ease the burden on librarians of negotiating separate license agreements with a multitude of publishers and independent titles, and promote a more cost-effective publishing environment.

August 12, 2009 – Berkeley, CA and New York, NY – University of California Press, the not-for-profit publishing arm of the University of California and JSTOR, the preservation archive and research platform that is part of the not-for-profit ITHAKA, will work in partnership – and encourage others to join them – to make current and historical scholarly content available on a single, integrated platform, to provide a single point of purchase and access for librarians and end users around the world, and to ensure its long-term preservation.

Beginning in 2011, current content from all University of California Press published journals, including those from scholarly societies, will be hosted on a re-designed JSTOR platform. Faculty and students around the world will be able to access all licensed content on JSTOR – current issues, back issues, and a growing set of primary source materials from libraries – easily and seamlessly. JSTOR’s nearly 6,000 library participants worldwide will be able to license the Press’s current journals, either individually or as part of current issue collections, together with JSTOR back issue collections in a single transaction.
“We hear from many publishers about the challenges they face in managing technology and achieving the scale needed to build visibility and a widespread subscription base for their journals.“ said Michael Spinella, JSTOR Managing Director, “At the same time libraries and users often find it difficult to license and use high-quality publications scattered among hundreds of different publishers and sites. This new effort is aimed at providing users seamless access to a wide range of current and historical content, while enabling libraries to support their access in more cost-effective ways.”

“This should really help publishers, libraries, and the community,” added Rebecca Simon, Associate Director of University of California Press and Director of the Journals + Digital
Publishing Division. “UC Press and our society clients will host our publications on a platform where we benefit from rich functionality and wider exposure to libraries than we have today, where JSTOR’s millions of users will be able to access the full breadth of our content in a place they visit regularly, and where libraries will be able to add our publications to their holdings with the ease of a single license agreement and invoice from JSTOR, while also being assured of their preservation over time.”

The Current Scholarship Program – as the effort will be known – grew out of a long-standing relationship and dialogue between UC Press and JSTOR who share an understanding of the problems facing scholarly communications and a deep desire to work together to craft a sustainable publishing model that embodies academic values.  The effort was also informed by research conducted by Ithaka S+R, the strategy and research arm of ITHAKA, over the past several years and the group’s ongoing work to understand and develop sustainable business models and support innovation in the development and dissemination of digital scholarship.

Driving the partnership is an articulated set of principles, among them: supporting the broad dissemination of quality scholarship through affordable and sustainable means, promoting fair and transparent pricing, facilitating seamless access to authoritative content of all kinds, and ensuring reliable, long-term preservation and access to scholarship. Organizations interested in joining the Program in the future – whether commercial or non-commercial – will be encouraged to embrace these fundamentals as well.

“Now is the time for new approaches that will enable the academic community to thrive in the future and to do so in ways and with organizations that understand and support scholarly values,” said Lynne Withey, Director of University of California Press. “The Press’s purposes and interests are well aligned with our colleagues at ITHAKA and with those of other scholarly organizations and universities and colleges around the world. We know what we are after, and we are eager to have a greater, lasting impact by working together in ways that neither organization, nor our colleagues in other organizations and institutions, could alone.”

In addition to easing access to scholarly content, the redesigned JSTOR platform will also offer enhanced functionality to support the publication of new digital scholarship.  Working with Atypon Systems, whose Literatum technology is underlying both JSTOR and UC Press’s current platforms, the new platform will provide for the delivery of multimedia content, increased personalization features, and new navigation and visualization features.  This development will help authors and their publishers take better advantage of technology in the creation, explication, and impact of their work.

For more information about the Current Scholarship Program, see
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/programs/currentScholarship.jsp

–END–

JSTOR
JSTOR is a preservation archive and research platform for the academic community.  Through JSTOR, faculty, researchers, and students are able to discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive of over 1,000 academic journals, as well as conference proceedings, monographs, and other scholarly content. Nearly 6,000 libraries and cultural heritage institutions and hundreds of the world’s leading publishers of scholarly literature participate in and support JSTOR.  JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization helping the academic community use digital technologies to advance scholarship and teaching in sustainable ways. ITHAKA also includes two additional services – Ithaka S+R and Portico.

www.jstor.org
www.ithaka.org

University of California Press
Founded in 1893, University of California Press is one of the largest and most distinguished of  American university presses, publishing books and journals in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. The Press publishes nearly 200 new books and 40 journals each year, representing a broad spectrum of acclaimed works from innovative first works by young academics to in-depth articles presenting the results of the research and creative thinking of many of the world’s foremost scholars. A major publisher of scholarly journals, the Journals + Digital Publishing Division has extensive experience providing traditional and digital publishing services for more than 20 client scholarly societies and associations.

www.ucpressjournals.com
www.ucpress.edu

It costs more than three times as much to publish an article in a humanities or social-science journal as it does to publish one in a science, technical, or medical, or STM, journal, and the prevailing model used by many publishers of STM journals will not work for their humanities and social-sciences counterparts. Those are some of the eye-opening conclusions released today in a report on an in-depth study of eight flagship journals in the humanities and social sciences.

Find the whole article here:
http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=XGjPVWFxjhprCnyFp2ZdnDwvTVGHyyZm

(Forget open access.  Why again are we are dismantling the university press system and selling/giving away the pieces to these folks?)

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.

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.

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?