Open Access Anthropology

Just a note to note that I have made public an essay titled “Our Circulatory System (or Folklore Studies Publishing in the Era of Open Access, Corporate Enclosure and the Transformation of Scholarly Societies).” The piece began with a series of posts published on this site in 2008 and was a talk given at the [...]

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 [...]

A friend who is very involved in the leadership of the American Folklore Society  just shared with me a link to James Lappin’s very effective blog post “The Impact of the Web 2.0 World on the Records Management Society.”  While presented as a case study of information science/archives organizations in the UK, its arguments generalize [...]

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 [...]