Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Thursday, February 28, 2008

New OA journal on museum anthropology

Museum Anthropology Review is a new OA journal published by the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries. The journal was announced on February 21. It began in February 2007 as a pilot project. The journal is peer-reviewed and edited by Jason Baird Jackson, associate professor in folklore and ethnomusicology at IU. From the announcement, on the journal's motivation:

...Jackson founded Museum Anthropology Review on the basis of his experiences as editor of an established closed-access journal in his field -- the similarly titled and focused Museum Anthropology. Unlike Museum Anthropology Review, this more established journal is published by the American Anthropological Association in a partnership with the for-profit publisher Wiley-Blackwell.

"The costs associated with publishing in the traditional mode are astronomical," Jackson said. "Publication of a single research article in Museum Anthropology can cost thousands of dollars and, when published, the results will then be available to a small proportion of people worldwide."

Jackson said that making scholarly work more easily and affordably accessible is especially important in fields like folklore and anthropology that are rooted in the study of local cultures worldwide.

"If, for instance, a scholar spends months documenting the work of an elderly woodcarver living in a small American town and then writes about what she learned in a peer-reviewed research article, I have an obligation as her editor to make it as easy as possible for the schoolchildren of that town -- or the artist's grandchildren -- to gain access to her writing. Open access repositories and journals, in their varied forms, help make this possible." ...

Comment. See also this Inside Higher Ed story on the journal.