Open Access Anthropology

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 [...]

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, [...]

Reposted from Savage Minds.
Important post from Change Congress over at Huffington Post:
You may have heard of Big Oil, but have you heard of “Big Paper”? We know, it sounds absurd, but check this out.
Right now, there’s a proposal in Congress to forbid the government from requiring scientists who receive taxpayer funds for medical research to [...]

While nodding in the direction of the AAA publication program of which I am a part, I have danced around the question of placing publisher produced PDFs (final, typeset versions of articles, etc.) in subject/institutional repositories and on personal websites on a number of occasions, most recently in a comment on SavageMinds related to articles [...]

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 [...]

I’m happy to announce version 1.0 of our Creative Commons licensed poster promoting self-archiving among anthropologists. Feel free to remix and reuse as you see fit – and share those remixes with us. (You can always download the latest version of the PDF and the original Apple Pages document here.)
This document is meant to [...]

Oops, not CC Lemon, but CC Learn … my mistake.
ccLearn is a division of Creative Commons which is dedicated to realizing the full potential of the Internet to support open learning and open educational resources (OER). Our mission is to minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and [...]

[Originally posted on Savage Minds.]
As anthropologists move towards more and more open models of sharing knowledge it will be important to be aware of the potential conflicts this might cause for indigenous groups who wish to restrict access to that knowledge. We’ve all heard of individual words being trademarked, but what if indigenous people wish [...]

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 [...]