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.

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 publish their findings openly on the Internet.

This ban on “open access publishing” (which is currently required) would result in a lot of government-funded research being published exclusively in for-profit journals — inaccessible to the general public.

Why on earth would anyone propose this? A new report by transparency group MAPLight.org shows that sponsors of this bill — led by Rep. John Conyers — received twice as much money from the publishing industry as those on the relevant committee who are not sponsors.

This is exactly the kind of money-for-influence scheme that constantly happens behind our backs and erodes the public’s trust in government.

A notice from Change Congress’s Facebook page suggests action you can take. (Reproduced here after the jump.)

We sent out an email to our supporters this week highlighting a certain bill going before Congress to forbid the government from requiring scientists who receive taxpayer funds for medical research to publish their findings openly on the Internet.

This ban on “open access publishing” (which is currently required) would result in a lot of government-funded research being published exclusively in for-profit journals — inaccessible to the general public.

We’re asking folks to call their member of Congress and tell them to vote against this bill. We’ve also drafted up a phone script for you to use at the bottom of this note:

202-224-3121 – to call your local House member
202-225-3951 – to call Rep. Conyers

So far we’ve had great coverage on the issue and hope you can continue to help it grow:

HUFF POST: Is John Conyers shilling for special interests?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-lessig-and-michael-eisen/is-john-conyers-shilling_b_171189.html

TECH PRESIDENT: What Cash Records Suggest About Conyers’ Clamp Down on Open Science
http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/what-cash-records-suggest-about-conyers-clamp-down-open-science

OPEN ACCESS NEWS: Publisher money behind the Conyers bill
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/03/publisher-money-behind-conyers-bill.html

JACK & JILL POLITICS: Is John Conyers Shilling for Big Paper?
http://www.jackandjillpolitics.com/2009/03/is-john-conyers-shilling-for-big-paper/

SUPERSPADE: Rep. Conyers, the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act is not fair
http://www.thesuperspade.com/rep-conyers-the-fair-copyright-in-research-works-act-is-not-fair/

HAL PLOTKIN: We Must Stop Conyers Corrupt H.R. 801
http://www.plotkin.com/blog-archives/2009/03/we_must_stop_co_1.html

LESSIG BLOG: John Conyers and Open Access
http://www.lessig.org/blog/2009/03/john_conyers_and_open_access.html

We hope you’ll make a call today and help grow the effort! Below is the phone script for the phone calls.

Thanks!

Japhet Els
Change Congress
————————–

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“Hello, my name is __________ and I’d like to let Rep. [NAME] know that I, along with groups like the American Library Association, the Alliance For Taxpayer Access as well as 33 Nobel Laureates in science, oppose bill H.R. 801 the “Fair Copyright in Research Act,” that will keep valuable tax-payer funded research inaccessible to the public online. This sort of life-saving research and information should be open for all to read on the Internet and not hidden from the public in for-profit journals.

I am deeply concerned about a new report from MAPLight.org showing that sponsors of this bill, led by Congressman Conyers, received twice as much money in campaign contributions, as those who are non-sponsors. This sort of influence-peddling is exactly what needs to be stopped in our government.

I’m calling to ask Rep. [NAME] to publicly put out a statement opposing H.R. 801. Can you please deliver that message?

Thank you for your time.”

NOTE: For Rep. Conyers, please ask him to drop bill H.R. 801

If this understanding is correct, then authors publishing under the standard AAA author agreement would not have the right to post the final published version of their papers on a personal website or in repositories. This would hold true for any image files that visually replicated the published version, regardless of format or the source of the file (scanning the paper oneself, obtaining the pdf file from AnthroSource, etc.).

According to the AAA entry in the SHERPA/RoMEO database, it is expected that pre-prints that are placed online must be replaced by the post-print upon publication. This means that authors seeking publication in a AAA journal would need to be cautious about placing early “working paper” versions of their articles online in repositories as (unlike author websites) such archives do not generally have provisions for removing content which has been made available therein. Placing a pre-peer review draft on an author website would pose little danger, as replacing it with the post-peer review version after publication would present little technical challenge (although it would, of course, mess with any existing weblinks and the author website route looses many of the stability, metadata and permanence benefits associated with robust repositories). The RoMEO database entry describes other conditions governing the posting of pre-prints and post-prints. I am not describing these here and I would urge authors to study their author agreements and the RoMEO database entry completely before posting their AAA related work online. Of course, related issues arise with most published works, thus the AAA case is just one of many of relevance to authors in our field. The RoMEO database provides guidance on hundreds of publishers.

While the AAA record in the SHERPA/RoMEO “Publisher copyright policies and self-archiving” database shows a “most recent update” date of February 15, 2008, it also makes reference to the University of California Press’ online content system “Caliber” (and AnthroSource) rather than to Wiley InterScience, the publisher-wide system by which AAA content is now made available by the AAA’s publishing partner Wiley-Blackwell (WB also now produces AnthroSource. The University of California Press is no longer involved in AAA publishing.). I mention this irregularity as a reminder that SHERPA/RoMEO or any similar system cannot, by its very nature, perfectly reflect the (often rapidly changing) details of every publisher’s circumstances and policies. It is a guide for the use of authors and repository managers, but it is not a substitute to knowing what a particular author agreements says and means in its specifics.

Those interested in the issue of posting/archiving publisher produced PDFs may find a new report by SHERPA/RoMEO of interest. A study of the 414 publishers tracked in the database found that 51 allow immediate use of the final published PDF on author websites and in repositories. Some additional publishers allow for use of the published file after embargo periods ranging between 6 months and 5 years Find out more about this analysis and see the publisher list here. (I first learned of this list thanks to Open Access News.) Most of the publishers listed are not prominent in anthropological publishing, but two are well-known to our field–Duke University Press (which publishes Public Culture and Ethnohistory among other titles) and the University of California Press (which, while no longer publishing the AAA journals, still publishes a number of relevant area studies, sociology and history journals).

Searching the RoMEO database for American Anthropological Association can get one to the database’s entry for the association. (See here.)

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?

This document is meant to reach a wide audience, please print it out on a nice color printer and post to your department bulletin board!

Links mentioned in our flier: SPARC | RoMEO | UMI | Mana’o

For more detailed information, please visit the Eprints Self-Archiving FAQ.

UPDATE: Added version numbers to the PDF. It now reads version 1.4.

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 social barriers.

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 to restrict use of their entire language?

A great discussion is emerging over at the blog Transient Languages & Cultures, where Jane Simpson has summed up some of the central issues in an ongoing series of posts over at Language Log, together with significant additional commentary of her own:

Three differences are important here – a difference between rights held by an individual and rights held by a group, a difference over which rights can be traded and which are inalienable, and a difference as to whether a right-holder has the right to license other people to enjoy some part of that right.

The one case I’ve heard of before is that of the Hopi. The Hopi Cultural Preservation Office “sought to enact a Tribal ordinance that ‘the Hopi language shall be for the exclusive use of the Hopi people’” as discussed by Peter Whiteley. (I think there is another well known article on this, but I can’t recall where I read it.) Another related paper is “Protecting Traditional Knowledge and Expanding Access to Scientific Data” (PDF) by Eric Kansa (of the Digging Digitally blog), together with Jason Schultz (EFF) and Ahrash Bissell (Duke). Hopefully we will eventually create a page devoted to the topic over at the Open Access Anthropology Wiki.

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 and/or postprints, and within institutional repositories.

This is great news, and Open Access Anthropology will be encouraging authors to make use of these rights as well as providing education and resources to facilitate this process.

However, not all anthropology journals are handled by U.C. Press, and so you may need to negotiate these rights when you sign a contract for your next article. Fortunately, SPARC has put together “Author Rights – an educational initiative that informs faculty across all disciplines about how to use the SPARC Author Addendum to secure their rights as authors of journal articles.” This should make it easy to explain exactly what you want and to ensure that you use the proper language to secure those rights in your contract.