Over the break I’ve been reading John Willinsky’s The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship. It’s a good book and I recomend it to anyone with an interest in Open Access issues but who can’t digest the massive stream of information that is Peter Suber’s Open Access News blog. In the case of the AAA [American Anthropological Association], I think the argument for open access is more or less won—given anthropology’s populist sensibilities and obsession with ‘relevance’ it’s not surprising that there is strong support (at least in my experience) for the AAA to make its journals open to the public. The biggest problem that open access advocates have is the business model—how will we pay the production costs of these journals?
I was surprised, then, to see that in Appendix B of his book Willinsky inclued the annual publication budgets of a dozen or so scholarly associations—including the AAA. I have to admit that I had never thought of looking up any of these figures, or even wonder where they might be found. Willinsky’s data is based on the AAA’s tax forms for 2000. According to him the AAA made US$4,680,764 that year, US$637,950 of which came from publication revenue as well as US$6,679 in royalties. However, it cost US$790,113 to produce AAA journals. In other words, the AAA lost US$145,504 producing its journals in 2000....What does this all mean? I have absolutely no idea. I was just struck that I had never looked at or thought about these figures before—and this despite the fact that I have heard many, many rants from people on everything ranging from the incredible inefficiency and corruption of the AAA to endless griping about how the rank and file doesn’t understand that yes, it actually costs something to run the AAA. Seeing these figures at least provides some ballpark understanding of where the AAA is, and what kind of latitude it has to go to other places as it pursues different approaches to publication.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/02/2006 10:20:00 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.
