There is, of course Mana’o, but as Jason pointed out, that has been off line for some time. It is possible that it will be resuscitated, but since it doesn’t look like the AAA is likely to offer a service which would compete with Anthrosource, I’d like to suggest that Anthropologists start looking at some of the Edupunk alternatives.

When I posted a query about this to the Open Access Anthropology Google Group, archaeologist Mike Smith pointed me to a great blog post he had already written by Digger on this topic:

So I did a little experiment. I fished out some conference papers I’ve given, a couple of journal articles, and a book. I posted them to four “put your stuff out there” locations online, all free:

Mendeley.com Mostly a reference management tool that lets you access your .pdfs from anywhere – especially helpful when I have references that overlap between work and personal. They do also have a Personal Profile page, where you can make your own work available as downloads for anyone. The site can be slow to load.

CiteULike Again, mostly a reference management tool, similar to Mendeley. You can make your papers available for download by anyone. I find it kinda clunky vs. Mendely, but have found a few references I didn’t otherwise know about.

Academia.edu Facebook for academics. With the ability to post papers for people to access, as well as posting research interests, joining groups of folks that share your interests, etc. Perk: you get email when someone searches on you or “follows” you, and you can see how many people have looked at your stuff. Note: it only -looks- like you need a university affiliation to be listed here. Scroll through, there is an “Independent Researcher” catagory.

SelectedWorks Strictly a portal to post your stuff and have it available. Folks can subscribe to get updates, but that’s about it for the acasocial framework. One perk: realtime reports about how many copies of your stuff have been downloaded. They also convert your .docs into .pdfs and index them.

Time passed. The results? Mendeley and CiteuLike, from what I can tell, did squat for me in the “making stuff available” department (though I’m sticking with Mendeley for managing references). Academia.edu – had a few folks peek at the papers; apparently there is a trickle of visitors coming in via Google, no Google Scholar links. I give it a meh.

The real winner here is SelectedWorks. I can see people are accessing and downloading my stuff. It is totally easy to update my site. And, time to Google Scholar for everything (book, journal articles, conference papers) = 1 month. Even though I didn’t provide full text for the book and one journal article, they’re now indexed in Google Scholar.

If your university has an account with SelectedWorks, it’s easy to get listed. But, you can be listed as an individual for free, it’s just not readily apparent. From their homepage, scroll to the bottom and click “Start a Site”. You will have to email them directly to get an access code (took < 1 day for me). That’s it. I found tweaking my abstracts to include words others might search for was helpful (Search Engine Optimization for scholarly papers, woot!), and the realtime download stats let me track that.

This is win-win, for writers (who get their stuff out there) and for researchers (who can find more stuff). It’s a little nerve-wracking to know that my stuff is being read, but I’m coping!

I am really impressed with SelectedWorks as well. I had forgotten that I’d signed up with an account some time ago. It took some time for them to get back to me, but as Mike Digger says, it is easy to sign up for a free account. Other options that Mike Digger didn’t mention include

• The Open Anthropology Cooperative has created its own repository in a wiki format.
• Scribd. Harvard UP has just begun selling 1000s of books via Scribd, using it as a digital publishing platform, including a few free titles as well. NYU and MIT Press are using it as well (although in different ways).
• Google Docs. They are improving their PDF capabilities, although it seems that one still needs to be logged in to Google Docs to read “public” PDFs.
• And a million file sharing tools such as Box.net, Mediafire, and Drop.io. Although these sites may not be as open to Google search results, you can store files there and link to them from your personal web page if you have one, or together with the OAC Repository wiki mentioned above.

There are certainly a lot of options out there now. But we also have to ask about the down side. What is lost when we post to an EduPunk archive instead of a proper institutional repository? For one thing, we loose a lot by not having proper metadata entered by a trained librarian, as was the case with Mana’o. And what about the legal issues? Open Access legal statements seem focused on personal websites and institutional repositories. There doesn’t seem to be language for something the kinds of services listed above… And, in his reply to my e-mail, Chris Kelty pointed out some other problems:

what is the eduPunk approach to archival persistence?  How would these tools allow for permanent findability and a certain sense that one can be sure it will stay available for a long time?  DOI numbers require an institutional home… COiNs data are easy to add to a blog post… Zotero can find things with this data… so maybe part of the blog post should be best practices for eduPunk  future-proofing…

All important questions to ask. I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments!

UPDATE: Changed author of blog post to Digger as per comments.

More info available on Open Access News and Anthropologi.info.

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.)

This is NOT a comment on this post, but I can’t find any other way to contact the authors of this blog (you should sort that out…) I wanted to ask you to post this, which was sent around my department of archaeology internally:

At his revised website _www.harrismatrix.com_ Dr. Ed Harris has arranged for the free downloading of his textbook Principles of Archaeological Stratigraphy. Long out of print and very expensive when it was, Harris was determined that the book should be widely available, especially to students, and therefore is giving it away for free. The site has been set up and is maintained by Dr. Wolfgang Neubauer and Klaus Loecker of the University of Vienna, to which Ed expresses his thanks for this service to archaeology.

Our apologies to Professor Meece for making the good-turn of calling this development to the field’s attention kind of a let down and a pain. Better late than never, I hope.

The book in question was originally published as: Edward C. Harris (1989) Principles of Archaeological Stratigraphy. Second Edition. New York: Academic Press. See its Open WorldCat entry here.

The author is to be commended for this effort. Free sure beats $79.50 and up for a used copy on Amazon. Perhaps the book can be added to Mana’o to insure availability in the years to come.

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?

What this means initially for the AAA and WB is that if any AAA journal want to publish an article by Harvard faculty, they need to do one of three things: 1) allow it to be open access 2) refuse to publish it or 3) convince the faculty member to request a waiver from Harvard. Now in some ways this is nothing new: author agreements for AAA publications already allow self-archiving, so there will no need to choose 2 or 3, unless WB decides to change that policy down the line (so this kind of policy is actually good insurance). In other ways, this is a significant step forward for OA because it reverses the role of inertia: instead of faculty defaulting to closed access, they now default to open access, which is in their interests, instead of contrary to them.

Now this policy can be mis-interpreted in a number of different ways (all of which Peter Suber has collected and responded to), but the basic fact is that this is almost the best possible policy for everyone. It functions by mandating permission–Harvard retains a non-exclusive right to everything its faculty publish, and therefore can choose to (and will) make it available in an Open Access repository open to anyone. Publishers, however, also get a non-exclusive right to publish the work in whatever form they see fit. The only thing it changes practically is that instead of faculty signing over ALL rights to the publisher, they retain some rights to circulate the article through OA repositories. And this right applies to the final, peer-reviewed version of an article. It’s the best of both worlds.

However, it raises an interesting question: Who’s your publisher now? If Harvard is the entity actually providing the work most widely, circulating it and allowing people to read it, what exactly does the AAA or WB provide for you? And as more universities adopt similar policies, it’s possible that the de facto locus of scholarly work could shift from publishers to libraries and eprint servers at different universities—which if its done well, will use high-quality metadata, provide full-text searching, and be visible easily to any search engine. So, you might ask yourself: what in the world is the AAA/WB providing authors who seek to publish in their journals? It certainly isn’t the article, which the AAA and WB are still trying desperately to make everyone pay an extra fee to get, when they could get it for free… so what gives?

This isn’t a stupid question, in fact it’s at the heart of both the old problem AAA had (how to pay for the costs of publication) as well as the new problem it has (how to pay for the costs of publication when authors and their universities are giving it away for free). The answer, to my mind is actually simple: what AAA can provide is, among other things:

1. prestige;
2. high quality peer review;
3. creative, path-breaking editorial vision;
4. promotion and marketing;
5. public policy relevance and creative use of new information technology and new networking and publicity possibilities.

All of these things take hard work by committed people who in some cases are paid and in some cases volunteer their time. I would argue that these things are worth paying for. No one is owed any of these services, but the reality is we need new models of value to figure out how to pay for these services. The most obvious is that costs for these services should be explicitly accounted for as part of membership in the society (e.g. you can’t publish unless you are a member, but students and independent scholars get a waiver), as part of a university’s research budgets (Universities help faculty and especially graduate students pay to publish their work) and as part of a general funds-seeking strategy (e.g. Can I have a grant to develop innovative public policy relevant approach X or Y?). There are other ways to re-imagine accounting for the costs of publication if you can make explicit what services are being provided, and that they are part and parcel of the larger mission of a scholarly society.

However, how many of these things do AAA and WB adequately provide today? 1) Prestige? Perhaps, though they don’t have the market cornered. 2) Peer review? Yes, though one could argue that the journals only manage that service–academics provide it on a voluntary basis. 3) Editorial creativity? In the sections, definitely, but this is a huge point of contention right now, as AAA tries to centralize everything and take editorial creativity away from the sections. 4) promotion and marketing? More like the opposite of that, whatever that is. 5) Innovative public policy uses of information techno… oh, whatever.

So this puts us back in the same place as before: what exactly is the AAA providing that we can’t get elsewhere? If its a bit of prestige and the mere management of the peer review process, then that ain’t much folks. But I actually believe there is a lot more there, and I increasingly believe that it is in the sections of the AAA, where creative editorial direction, well-managed peer-review processes, and creative approaches to promotion, public policy relevance and rolodexing and networking is likely to occur… not within the Wiley Blackwell AAA Borg, which seems to be worried only about page counts and trim sizes and whether or not we allow only individual or institutional subscriptions.

Excuse me, please stop moving those deck chairs around, and put on this life jacket…

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.