From Michael Brown's objection to OA for AnthroSource:
I’m generally sympathetic to Rex’s goal of open access, and I believe that the AAA could have handled this discussion better. But isn’t it important to consider the unique economic circumstances of a professional organization such as the AAA and the subfield societies under its institutional umbrella? ...
[W]hat are the odds that the AAA’s membership roster will grow once its journals are available to everyone for free? The Association is still burdened with most of the costs of producing the journals (which might be curtailed but by no means eliminated by abandoning paper editions), but its income is likely to decline. Sounds like a death spiral to me....
In sum, I believe that the AAA case has less to do with Big Content, for which I have limited sympathy, than about the difficult funding realities of professional organizations.
I have an article forthcoming in Anthropology News which deals with these objections at length but, very briefly:
1. No one has ever argued that the AAA give away its content free to everyone and then money will magically appear in their coffers....
5. The AAA’s publication program is NOT running in the black. It is losing money. This problem is only going to get worse...
6. The choice is NOT between a known-working charge-for-content model and a utopian and unworkable OA-inspired model. The choice is between an OA-inspired model which risks failure and a charge-for-content model which is a proven failure....
8. Membership in the AAA is incentivized by many things—mostly because of the way the AAA meetings monopolize the labor pool in anthropology. But also because the cost of joining is relatively low and paid for (for some) by their institutions.
The AAA has institutional and political ties with the companies that hired Dezenhall. The AAA also has a mindset in which revenues are generated by charging for content. Enforcing scarcity is a logical strategy given these assumptions. The result is that the AAA ignores OA-inspired opportunities to cut costs, generate revenue, and create a sustainable business model....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/31/2007 11:03:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
