In April 2005 the AAA launched a confidential survey to its full membership to seek information about members’ current practices for communicating electronically about the association and their research....Although there is a wide recognition of the usefulness of posting conference papers and supplementary materials online, there is minimal willingness to post one’s own work, and there is even less willingness to submit online comments on annual meeting papers. This is true regardless of age or employment status of the respondent....If respondents were to post [conference] papers and other substantive materials online, which they do not think should be mandatory, they would prefer to do so either after the annual meeting or in the month preceding it; they would also find such submitted materials most useful during this time. There is marked interest in annual meeting papers and abstracts being electronically accessible indefinitely, coupled with little interest in the preservation of online bulletin boards and interactive discussion forums for more than four months....Respondents were asked about Creative Commons licensing options available through AnthroCommons (these options range from the “all rights reserved” of traditional copyright to a voluntary “some rights reserved” copyright), and their views on Open Access models. (Open Access is a movement to grant access to a large variety of up-to-date information sources, electronically, for free.) Results suggest that respondents value the idea of Creative Commons and the Open Access model (such as AnthroCommons); yet, only a third of the respondents who completed this survey, or roughly the number who accessed AnthroCommons, completed this question. Also of those five people who responded that they had actually posted material, three respondents selected a Creative Commons license and two a traditional “all rights reserved” copyright option....The full report of the AAA Electronic Communications Survey is available through the AAA website.
Also see this comment by Judd Antin on his blog:
[I]s there something fundamental about anthropology that makes the discipline averse to an open model? Anthropology is, after all, based on fieldnotes which are deeply personal and often private. Maybe these values extend to other forms of writing as well, such as notes, conference papers, and even online discussions. Many anthropologists were (and in some cases still are) also indoctrinated with the idea that anthropology is about the lone ethnographer, trudging off into the jungle to find his or her ‘people.’ If anthropologists believe that doing anthropology is a lone enterprise, and further that the product of their work is too deeply personal and individual to share, does that erect an insurmountable barrier to Open Source Anthropology, at least for the foreseeable future? Or is it just a generational thing - the old, ‘traditional’ anthropologists are as stuck in the mud as they’ve ever been?...Maybe our only choice is to sit back and wait for the paradigm shift when the current generation of thought leaders fades away....So maybe the obstinacy of many anthropologists isn’t insurmountable. The challenge is to maintain a critical mass of anthropologists who continue to contribute and share freely. If the explosion of blogging anthropologists is any indication, it’s a promising future.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/21/2005 10:31:00 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.
