Open Access News

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Tuesday, October 07, 2008

AAA adopts 35 year embargo on OA backfile

AAA Creates "Open Access" to Anthropological Research, a press release from the American Anthropological Association, October 6, 2008.  Excerpt:

In a groundbreaking move aimed at facilitating greater access for the global social science and anthropological communities to 86 years of classic, historic research articles, the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association announced today that it will provide, free of charge, unrestricted content previously published in two [of] its flagship publications – American Anthropologist and Anthropology News.

The initiative, among the first of its kind in the humanities- and social science-based publishing environment and made in coordination with publishing partner Wiley-Blackwell, will provide access to these materials for the purposes of personal, educational and other non-commercial uses after a thirty-five year period.

Starting in 2009, content published from 1888 to 1973, will be available through AnthroSource, the premier online resource serving the research, teaching, and professional needs of anthropologists. Previously, this information was only available via AAA association membership, subscription or on a so-called “pay per view” basis.

“This historic move, initiated by the needs and desires of our worldwide constituency, is our association’s pointed answer to the call for open access to our publications. This program, I believe, is an important first step in answering the call to un-gating anthropological knowledge,” AAA Executive Director Bill Davis said in a statement issued today.

The initiative, which will be re-evaluated by internal AAA committees in the next year (the Committee on Scientific Publication as advised by the Committee for the Future of Electronic Publishing), may be expanded in the future....

Update (10/7/08).  Here are a few comments from the blogosphere and press.

From Alex Golub on Open Access Anthropology:

Amazingly, I agree with Bill Davis that this is an ‘important first step in answering the call for un-gating anthropological knowledge’ — although I’d put the emphasis on ‘first step’....

Is this a big deal? It is hard to say. First, opening Anthropology News is trivial — it should have been done a long time ago, and everyone has agreed about this since the days when I served on the AnthroSource Steering Committee. The AAA should not be congratulated on taking four years to implement a change that could have taken a week.

Secondly, a 35 year window gives the world access to _most_ of American Anthropologist, including some of the most important work in our discipline. At first glance, this is not just good news, it is utterly superb news and the AAA should be commended for doing the right thing. But there are still lots of important questions to be answered: what license will this material be released under? In what form will it be made available? Can it be included in other repositories or only downloaded from the AAA website? ...[T]here is still plenty of time for this good news to turn sour....

There is one other thing to note: This decision clearly represents the success of the OA community’s decision to hold the AAA accountable, in public, for its actions. I honestly do not think this decision would have been made if the OA community had not called out the AAA and demanded to know what the hell it thought it was doing....

From Chris Kelty on Savage Minds:

Breaking News! Stop the Presses!!! OMGWTF!!!! ... [T]his is great, really, despite my snarkiness. The AAA has realized that opening up 35 year old scholarship is not a threat to their publishing revenue, and it may well improve public understanding of anthropology. This is a huge step forward....

However...It sucks that this is being called “open access”....[W]hat is happening here is a dissolution of the term open access and a pretty shameless use of this opportunity to issue a press release that might repair some of the damage the association has suffered on this issue. Fair enough, they are trying. Try harder, I say.

From Scott Jaschik in Inside Higher Ed:

The anthropology association has been divided for years over open access....Many rank-and-file anthropologists embrace the idea, seeing it as a way to most effectively communicate without imposing huge financial burdens on their libraries. But the association relies on revenue from subscriptions to its journals and has resisted repeated pushes from its own members to move in the direction of open access.

These tensions are not unique to anthropology, but the discipline has seen more than its share of flare-ups over the the issue, with pro-access scholars horrified that their association lobbied against open access legislation in Congress and that the scholarly society replaced a university press as its publishing agent with a for-profit publisher....

Several members of [the AAA Committee on Scientific Publication and Committee for the Future of Electronic Publishing], asking that their names not be revealed, said that some members of those panels had wanted the association to open up more recent scholarship, but that association leaders were cautious about going any further.

In an interview, Oona Schmid, director of publishing for the association, said, “We know we have members who really care about open access,” and that the shift amounted to “a really substantial offer.”

Asked about the 35-year time delay, Schmid cited research showing that the half life of articles in anthropology journals (meaning the time in which half of the scholarly citations they receive are made) is 12-15 years, and that the association wanted a time period that would keep journals for subscribers only while they were being cited....

Patricia Kay Galloway, an associate professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin, has previously served on anthropology association committees on digital publishing but left because of disputes over her support for open access. She said that the idea that open access involves a 35-year delay is “just crap.”

She said that “it’s nice to get” the older material, but noted that the field of anthropology has changed radically in the last 35 years on such issues as how indigenous people should be studied and the need to avoid “elitist bias.” She said “the most exciting work” is not going to be available in this program. “And that’s why people are not going to be impressed.”

The primary reason the association won’t go open access, she said, is to preserve revenue. And that’s not an appropriate reason, even if it means that the association might end up with a smaller operation....

Comments

  • The anthropology bloggers speak my mind, especially Chris Kelty:  "Fair enough, they are trying. Try harder, I say."  Thirty-five years is the longest embargo or moving wall I've ever seen a publisher boast about.  It's more than 10 times longer than the runner up.
  • Jaschik is right that "anthropology association has been divided for years over open access."  For the blow by blow, see our many past posts on the AAA and OA.

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