In response to a request from Jason Cross, anthropologist and lawyer in training at Duke University, I’ve been examining more carefully the available open access resources in and around anthropology. The aim is twofold. First I simply want to draw attention to how much action there has already been in making research open access, both old and new, primary (archival) and secondary. There isn’t a lot, actually, compared to a discipline like economics; but there is a growing array:
Individuals are self-archiving.
Workshops, conferences, and meetings are increasingly online.
New research projects frequently coordinate openly via the Internet
There are open access presses (Australian National University EPress)
There are open access options in major providers (including Wiley)
And slowly a move towards open accessing at least parts of the mainstream journals (like book reviews in American Ethnologist, and the Cultural Anthropology“Coke Complex” issue).
There are also primary resources that cultural institutions are beginning to make freely available, like The anthropological papers of The American Museum of Natural History.
The Mana’o project is already set to be THE place to archive research in anthropology, and I hope other ePrint servers follow suit so that not all of the work is on that project (though it would be nice if different future anthro ePrint servers federated their search tools).
Perhaps most significantly, I would say about 80% of OA Journals are non-English (especially in Spanish) and non American/EU resources....Given how often the question of “indigenous” anthropology comes up amongst students and colleagues I talk to (i.e. “does it exist?”) I think they would be surprised to discover just how thoroughly it is kicking our cosmopolitan asses in the race to make its research available on the net.
The second point I want to makes (which I do repeatedly) is about the changing nature of scholarship today, and the relationship between publication and the governance of scholarly societies and universities. Namely, universities and scholarly societies are not (and should not be) about making research available—they are (or should be) about making research good....
One of the spurious claims often raised about open access is that it threatens peer review. The logic behind this argument seems to be that open access is about bypassing the entire academic infrastructure from soup to nuts, and is therefore equivalent to individuals simply posting their research directly online. This argument makes my brain hurt, because to me, and to most OA proponents, open access is about making really good research really widely available. And research doesn’t get really good by being posted on the internet. Quite the opposite usually.
Now, I know everyone likes to believe that what makes research really good is the genius behind it, that cult of the individual artist that, especially in cultural anthropology, has reached a kind of fever pitch over the last 20 years. But in reality, good research is good because it is part of a social process that stretches from good pedagogy to constant interaction with peers, to delivering work at conferences and workshops, to having work peer reviewed to having it edited and checked, and to having it promoted, talked about, cited, taught, thought about and having it inspire others....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/13/2007 10:49:00 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.
