The political concern entails convincing the Section Assembly to admit us to their club of sections. In particular they do not want to admit a new section that duplicates any ongoing efforts, nor do they want to set us up for failure. This is why I said in my third post on organizing within the AAA (or not) that there’s a certain amount of proving our group useful to the membership that will be required first. For this I was blasted as looking to others for validation, but that misses the point. It’s more about converting others to our viewpoint that digital anthropology is worthwhile.

The realist concerns are about how much help we can expect to get from others in making our group a success. The interest group is a low risk, low commitment venture and so its fine for a short term goal. A section will require writing a governance document, getting elected officers, enforcing dues collection and so on. It is a much more time intensive venture. Of course, you get more political clout out of that, but what a lot of work. Let’s make that a long term goal for after we see how far we can take this interest group thing.

http://www.aaanet.org/sections/Newsectionpolicies.cfm

Deadline for new applications is March 15

“Back in 2009, the creation of the OAC was in fact inspired by a very similar discussion about Open Access and the AAA initially sparked by Kerim over at Savage Minds. We’re engaged in the same overall movement towards greater openness for anthropology, so if you joined the OAC, then you share similar hopes and expectations for progress.”

Exactly. Lots of people thinking along the same lines.

Just in case you don’t feel like scrolling up the page, here’s the link to the OAC thread:

http://openanthcoop.ning.com/forum/topics/making-anthropology-more-accessible-and-open

I’ve said this so often now, unheeded, that all I can do is echo it yet again:

Regardless of the size of the asking price (“reasonable” or unreasonable), it is an enormous strategic mistake for a university or research funder to commit to pre-emptive payment of Open Access Journal Publishing fees (Gold OA) until and unless the university or funder has first mandated Green OA self-archiving for all of its own published journal article output (regardless of whether published in OA or non-OA journals).

There are so far five signatories to the “Compact for Open-Access Equity.” Two of them have mandated Green OA (Harvard and MIT) and three have not (Cornell, Dartmouth, Berkeley). Many non-mandating universities have also been committing to the the pre-emptive SCOAP3 consortium.

If Harvard’s and MIT’s example is followed, and Green OA mandates grow globally ahead of Gold OA commitments, then there’s no harm done.

But if it is instead pre-emptive commitments to fund Gold OA that grow, at the expense of mandates to provide Green OA, then the worldwide research community will yet again have shot itself in the foot insofar as universal OA — so long within its reach, yet still not grasped — is concerned.

Harnad, S. (1991) Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge. Public-Access Computer Systems Review 2 (1): 39 – 53

Harnad, S. (1995) Universal FTP Archives for Esoteric Science and Scholarship: A Subversive Proposal. In: Ann Okerson & James O’Donnell (Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries, June 1995.

Harnad, S. (1999) Free at Last: The Future of Peer-Reviewed Journals. D-Lib Magazine 5(12) December 1999

Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives. Ariadne 35.

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access. Serials Review 30. Shorter version: The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus.

Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno’s Paralysis, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects. Chandos.

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L’Harmattan. 99-106.

Harnad, S. (2008) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. To appear in: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos.

Hyperlinked version of this posting:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/627-guid.html