Christopher Kelty, Recursive Public Irony, Savage Minds, May 24, 2005. On the obstacles to accessing one of his articles published in Cultural Anthropology and available through AnthroSource. Excerpt: 'Unfortunately, without a membership in the American Anthropological Association, the article costs $12. Not a bad price really, except that the research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation, and any self-respecting American Taxpayer should balk at paying a second time for research they have already funded....This semester I have affiliations at three separate universities --Rice University, MIT, and Harvard. It turns out all of these institutions have subscriptions to JSTOR --which contains copies of the journal up to 1997 --but none of them have subscriptions to AnthroSource, which contains the last six years of the journal --so even having standing at three very rich institutions does not guarantee access. Fine --I'm a member of the AAA in good standing, I think, I'll just access AnthroSource and download a copy of my own article. No go. The system doesn't recognize any permutation of any of my email addresses from any of the 8 years of meetings I have been to....Rub 1: I can’t even get a copy of my own article....[His request to use a Creative Commons license was turned down.] [The AAA] seemed to misunderstand the fact that what I wanted to encourage was for people to read my article, not the destruction of the AAA....[T]he goal of the society should be to promote and distribute our research, not restrict it....The cry always comes up: "but the AAA depends on subscription revenue, without it we will go bankrupt!" To this there are two answers: 1) if the only solution to this problem of revenue means sacrificing the goal of distributing our research or making it publicly available, then fine, adieu! But, more charitably 2) there should in fact be much more discussion about how to increase the revenue for the AAA --through means other than the restriction of research --especially publicly funded research. There are ways to do this and a very lively ongoing discussion in "Open Access" such as the work Peter Suber and Public Knowledge have done --why not engage it more?'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/24/2005 01:37:00 PM.
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.
