Recently Anthropologi.info blogged a new anthropology site, American Ethnography. American Ethnography is a very pretty site with monthly thematic collections of articles from AAA journals. My initial response was: “wow, how happy will the AAA be to see entire articles they are selling for money on AnthroSource being reproduced on the web for free?” So I was surprised—astonished would be a better word—when Martin, the proprietor of AE, pointed out a paragraph on the AAA website’s permissions page which states that:

AAA article content published before 1964 is in the public domain and may be used and copied without permission. The AAA asks only that you include a complete reference to the original publication and a link to AnthroSource.

I would actually prefer a little more specification of what “public domain” means exactly here, but its still an extremely positive step forward—well done AAA! And as for the rest of us, I we should take this opportunity to start making some of the foundational works in our discipline available as soon as possible. Not only will this enable everyone to learn about anthropology as a discipline, but it will also be interesting to see if subscriptions to AAA journals are affected. And if they are not, then perhaps we could convince AAA to make the moving wall on their content shorter than its current forty-four years…

Supporters of OA publishing can help the cause by “registering” with the journal.  This is free and easy and provides the option of getting Tables of Contents sent via email when new issues are published. Registering also helps us demonstrate to funders and other potential stakeholders that the journal has scholarly and public support. To do this, one can click the “For Readers” found under the Heading “Information”. Thanks to everyone who has supported this new effort.

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…

Perhaps the best North American-based example is Cultural Analysis, which I mentioned in the previous post. If one checks the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and similar sources, one can find other born digital, born open folklore and ethnology journals. As others have noted, new OA journals, across the disciplines, are particularly appealing to scholars working in other national and regional contexts. Among folklore journals that can be pointed to in this context are Elore published in Helsinki, Finland and Folklore, published in Tartu, Estonia. The former journal’s contents are mainly in Finnish, while the later publishes in English. According to its website, Folklore (not to be confused with the British TA journal of the same name) has been published online since 1996. Estonia and Finland have very long histories of robust folklore scholarship and they have always been major centers of disciplinary activity internationally, thus it is not surprising that scholars there would have taken a lead in the development of open, digital journals for the field.

For a several disciplines, The Bryn Mawr Classical Review, which was begun in 1990 and is based on the circulation of as-they-are-ready emailed book reviews, has provided a model for similar publication projects. In folklore studies, a email-based review service, with a searchable online database of content, was founded by my colleagues at Indiana University not long ago. Called the Journal of Folklore Research Reviews (JFRR for short), the project is based on the inspiration of The Bryn Mawr Classical Review and is an open access spin off of our house journal The Journal of Folklore Research (published in a conventional partnership with Indiana University Press). As a free service to the whole of folklore studies, the uptake on JFRR has been remarkable. Colleagues across the field really seem to value the bite-sized format of one review at a time delivered right to the email box.

It is a publication that spans folklore and anthropology, but I can note here the journal that colleagues and I founded a year ago–Museum Anthropology Review. Information on MAR and its move–announced publicly just last week–to a publishing partnership with the Indiana University Libraries can be found elsewhere on the web (see here, here, and here). I mention it in this context because my engagement with, and investigations of, open access publishing in folklore and anthropology stem largely from my experiences founding it.

My experiences with Museum Anthropology Review suggest to me that additional worthwhile OA folklore journals will likely be established in coming years. The process is relatively easy and inexpensive, given available tools. My reading of the landscape in folklore, anthropology and neighboring fields indicates that the house journal tradition may already being revived in the new digital context. An example that comes to mind here is Museum and Society, a journal launched in 2003 and centered on the Department of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester.

I want to conclude by returning to a point that I raised in my initial post. While sharing a great deal of common ground and common history, folklore studies and anthropology pose a contrast relative to OA publishing. In anthropology there is significant activism relative to OA and clear sense of a debate about the future to be engaged in. Developments in the American Anthropological Association’s publications program (discussed on Savage Minds and in the pages of higher education periodicals) have been a catalyst for these conversations. By contrast, far fewer folklorists are aware of such debates yet, because of the social organization and political economy of their field, OA is much less of a major transformation in the means of doing business for folklore studies. Barriers to achieving OA are much lower, but the longer term values that OA connects up with are also central to many folklorists sense of purpose.

This is perhaps clearest for the domain known as “public folklore.” Many U.S. folklorists work in the public sector, outside academia. Public folklore work centers on community-based culture work, including activities such as documenting the creative lives of traditional artists, developing public programs (festivals, exhibitions, concerts, presentations, demonstrations, etc.), and implementing public grant and curriculum initiatives. Public folklore programs, which are generally not-for-profits or part of state or local governments, have long sought the most cost effective means available by which to bring their research–both as documentation and as curated products–to the attention of various stakeholders, including students, source communities, policy makers and the general public. This goal has roots in the long term values of folklore studies in general, but it is also a very practical strategy at several levels, from the contingencies of project management through to the politics of program funding. The principles of open access, and even of open data, whether recognized as such or not, seem like second nature to many folklorists. Like other kinds of scholars in public practice, public folklorists often lack the time and incentive to prioritize the scholarly article or monograph relative to more immediate and historically more accessible genres of scholarly production–the white paper, the lesson plan, the event program, the museum exhibition, the briefing for policy makers, the conference proceeding. Like workers in neighboring fields, public folklorists have for many years grown accustomed of producing works in formats such as PDF and making these available via CD-ROM and internet download. Viewed from the perspective of public folklore work, OA in folklore studies predates the narrower, more strictly journal-like projects that I have been discussing.

Despite the advantages that I have highlighted, folklore studies does face some of the same limitations found in anthropology. Several major journals are entangled in the usual web of financial considerations. Still, most of these are published in partnership with not-for-profit university presses who are also strongly invested in the health of the field. As in anthropology, there is great variance among folklorists in terms of technical sophistication, in terms of technical access, and with respect to relative willingness to engage with new media. Folklorists, after all, have a longterm intellectual commitment to engaging with, and sometimes celebrating, time tested (sometimes moribund) technologies and of maintaining respect for those who prefer not to jump on bandwagons.

It will be interesting to see where OA projects go in folklore studies and to see what lessons other disciplines will offer the field.

A second path in folklore involves the use of institutional repositories as an effective means of getting the back run of a journal available online. The two instances that I know best are projects at my home institution, Indiana University. Again, such efforts are easiest for journals that remain, in some fashion, under the control of a small, localized collective.

As I mentioned previously in another forum, The Folklore and Folk Music Archivist has been made available online in OA as part of IU’s institutional repository (known as IUScholarWorks). The Folklore and Folk Music Archivist is no longer being published, but it was, and is, a valuable publication that was closely associated with the Archives of Traditional Music (ATM), a fantastically rich and important ethnographic sound archives here. This was a publication that was small enough that it could not easily be found everywhere it was wanted and the archives staff were regularly responding to requests from scholars seeking copies of individual articles. Making it available in OA is an obvious increase in the collective good as well as a minor problem solver for the archives staff. The ATM’s investment will pay dividends for years to come and, because the journal is no longer being published, it is a project with a recognizable starting and ending point. There are surely many more closed journal runs that could be readily added to appropriate repositories in similar fashion with relatively small investments of time and money.

Adding to the critical mass of folklore content in IUScholarWorks is an effort by the current staff of Folklore Forum. Folklore Forum, another long serving journal in the field, is an example of another kind of journal especially suitable for OA conversion–the student run, student published journal. (See law reviews as a related case, here.) “Forum” was founded in in 1968 and has been continuously published by the graduate students in what is now the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology since this time. Recently the student editors worked with the IUScholarWorks project to make the entire back run available. While the repository collection for the Folklore and Folk Music Archivist contains 76 works, the Folklore Forum collection contains (as of tonight) 1369 items, making it the largest discrete collection in the repository. Because Folklore Forum is still a going concern (the students are preparing to release a new issue (to be born both digital and OA)), the repository collection will be continuing to grow. (Anyone consulting Folklore Forum for the first time will be amazed at all the people who have published in it, including scholars who are today major figures in folklore and anthropology.)

Discussion of Folklore Forum as a student run journal brings the discussion to OA start ups. I will take this up next time, but I can point to one example–Cultural Analysis–that I have mentioned here previously. It was founded by folklore students at the University of California–Berkeley. While some of its prime movers have gone on to become alumni of that program, the journal retains its association with the Berkeley folklore program.

[Thanks go to Gavin Baker for reposting my earlier entry to Open Access News.]

Beyond calling attention to a number of potentially interesting OA projects, I am going to try to tease out broader lessons for OA in both fields. There are some practical reasons for the rapid spread of OA in folklore studies despite the almost complete lack of a communal discussion of the subject (contra anthropology). One factor in my analysis is the persistence of “house journals” in folklore programs in contrast to their progressive disappearance in anthropology programs. American anthropology can point to a few such journals that remain central, for instance Ethnology (still published by the folks at Pittsburgh), the Journal of Anthropological Research (published by the department at New Mexico), and Anthropological Linguistics (published by my colleagues here at IU). Still, many of those that once existed as such have either gone on to become part of some publisher’s portfolio or have ceased publication. For purposes of a switch to OA, a house journal stands the best chances among the varieties of established (as opposed to start up) journals. House journals of various kinds are still in the hands of a small group of people, they have not become key money makers for either a press or a society. This positions them more easily for a move to OA. Their established track records and deep back files make them especially appealing to those who worry about the career/status risks of publishing in an online start-up.

An OA folklore title that I can highlight in this context is the well regarded journal Oral Tradition. OT has been published for over 20 years by the Center for Studies of Oral Tradition at the University of Missouri. It was once a standard print journal, but its editorial team has made a active and complete move to OA, making over 10,000 pages available for free online (the complete journal run). It has also worked hard to develop media supplements to enhance standard articles, while maintaining continuity in peer-review, editorial style and significance within the larger field.

Next time, I will look at point to a few more house journal OA conversions and then begin tackling the startups and institutional repository projects.