Letter to Sections
kerim
- telling them about both the meeting and the website and providing an
overview of the issue.
- kerim
kerim
sections of the AAA. I'd like to do this soon, as I think it would be
best if people had some time to look at the web page before coming to
the AAA. We will get more people at the meeting this way. The big
question I have: How to sign the letter?
- Kerim
This past summer the AAA executive committee signed a letter opposing
federal legislation which would have mandated that federally funded
research be made available via an open access model. The AAA says that
doing so would hurt our "business model." In fact according to John
Willinsky's book The Access Principle (p. 219) in 2000 the AAA lost
over US$100,000 on publications. What is at stake here is not profits,
but the very principle of shared anthropology. How can anthropologists
work collaboratively with people who are unlikely to have free access
to the same body of knowledge that we do? At a time when rural villages
in India have web access, the subaltern can now start their own blogs,
indeed they are doing so already, but they still can't read
anthropology articles online!
Whether or not the AAA should adopt an Open Access model of publication
is open to debate, but it is a debate that the executive committee
doesn't want to have. They just abolished the AnthroSource steering
committee, which had proposed a range of initiatives to make our
collective work more accessible. We urge everyone to educate themselves
about this pressing issue, and to have this discussion within their
sections at the AAA.
There will be an informal meeting to discuss Open Access on Saturday
the 18th, at a location near the convention center. The location will
be announced Thursday evening (PST) on Savage Minds:
http://savageminds.org
In the mean time, there are various ways you can be involved
Learn about the issue:
http://openaccessanthropology.org is the best place to go for an
overview of the issues-and will get even better as we all help grow
it. (Its a wiki!)
Sign up for updates:
There is an Open Access Anthropology group which people are using as a
mailing list-you can sign up today to share your ideas or just keep
up to date with what is going on. So far the list is not very
high-volume, so you won't be drowned in email if you sign up.
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/open-access-anthropology/
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/open-access-anthropology/subscribe?hl=en
Join the conversation:
We've started an IRC channel where there's been a fair amount of
chat about OAA (although really it is just a place for anthropologists
to hang out in general). It's #savageminds on irc.freenode.net. If
you are unwise in the ways of IRC just go to IRC at work type in a
nickname, for 'server' put irc.freenode.net and for 'channel'
put #savageminds and then you should be good. If you are looking for an
IRC program, we recommend GAIM (PC) or Colloquy (Mac).
Kerim Friedman
I think it is best to make the letter short and sweet and to put
additional info like this on the Wiki. The main point of the letter
being to motivate people to action ... (i.e. visit the web page,
attend the meeting, join the list, etc.). However, if you think such
information will help achieve these goals then I'm happy to make
changes.
I still am wondering how to sign the letter. Should we list all our
names, or should I just list my own name, or should we call ourselves
something (e.g. "committee for a more open AAA")?
Cheers,
Kerim
On 11/8/06, Kambiz Kambiz <kam...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think this is a very strong letter, Kerim. Do you think it is wise to
> bring up that open access is a sustainable business model? I mean, that
> is very relative, but there are excellent model organizations that are
> using open access that people can research and see how they work...
> such as PLoS, http://plos.org
>
> Kambiz
> > http://openaccessanthropology.orgis the best place to go for an
> > overview of the issues-and will get even better as we all help grow
> > it. (Its a wiki!)
> >
> > Sign up for updates:
> >
> > There is an Open Access Anthropology group which people are using as a
> > mailing list-you can sign up today to share your ideas or just keep
> > up to date with what is going on. So far the list is not very
> > high-volume, so you won't be drowned in email if you sign up.
> >
kerim
point we need to divvy up responsibility for sending it to each of the
various section mailing lists.
I will send it to the East Asia section, Linguistic Anthro section ,
Visual Anthro Section and the North America section whose mailing lists
I'm currently subscribed to.
We need volunteers to agree to forward it to the other sections. See
the full list below!
Thanks!
kerim
Sections and Interest Groups
American Ethnological Society
Anthropology and Environment Section
Archaeology Division
Association for Africanist Anthropology
Association for Feminist Anthropology
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Association of Black Anthropologists
Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists
Association of Senior Anthropologists
Biological Anthropology Section
Central States Anthropological Society
Council for Museum Anthropology
Council on Anthropology and Education
Council on Nutritional Anthropology (See Society for the Anthropology
of Food and Nutrition below)
Culture and Agriculture
East Asian Studies in Anthropology Section (See Society for East Asian
Anthropology below)
Evolutionary Anthropology Society
General Anthropology Division
Middle East Section
National Association for the Practice of Anthropology
National Association of Student Anthropologists
Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges
Society for Cultural Anthropology
Society for East Asian Anthropology - KERIM
Society for Humanistic Anthropology
Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
Society for Linguistic Anthropology - KERIM
Society for Medical Anthropology
Society for Psychological Anthropology
Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness
Society for the Anthropology of Europe
Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition
Society for the Anthropology of North America -KERIM
Society for the Anthropology of Religion
Society for the Anthropology of Work
Society for Urban, National and Transnational/Global Anthropology
Society for Visual Anthropology - KERIM
Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists
Alex Golub
There was some writing and revising of the letter to sections today on
IRC. The letter was pretty heavily revised by ckelty and then I gave it
the once over as well. Here is the version we have. It's really quite
strong, I think, but I apologize if it looks like we slashed your prose.
Here it is:
Cui Bono? Open Access and the AAA
Everyone's saying it: scholarly societies are in crisis, and the AAA is
among them. Dwindling revenues from sales of AAA Journals are among the
causes, and if we don't staunch the bleeding now, we are warned, there
will be nothing left to give.
How has the AAA gotten to a point where its solvency seems to be based
solely on the sales of our scholarly work? Work that has already been
paid for by public and private granting agencies and universities, and
work we pay membership dues to present at a conference we pay
registration fees to attend? Why must we charge our readers in turn to
get access? Cui Bono?
The AAA's solution is Anthrosource, but rather than make the situation
better, Anthrosource introduces new problems: it has the potential to
rob sections of their revenue, while making our work available only to
members--not to people in other disciplines or to our collaborators and
informants or to the public at large.
To make matters even worse, recently the AAA publicly voiced its
opposition to Federal Legislation that would require federally funded
research to be freely available to the people who paid for it:
citizens. This public opposition is clearly not in the interest of
members -- and the Anthrosource Steering Committee has publicly said as
much, proposing a range of initiatives to make our collective work more
accessible. For this criticism, the ASSC was dissolved.
Clearly, something needs to change.
1) we the need a solid open access policy to make anthropological
research widely available,
2) we need a more transparent financial arrangement between the members
and the society
3) we need a form of financial sustainability that does not compromise
the the ability to disseminate our research.
We invite the sections and their members to start thinking creatively
about the solution to these problems. Digital publishing gives us the
technology to make our work widely available, so let's use it! Our
colleagues in the sciences and social sciences have already begun the
experiment, and we should critically examine their successes and failures.
We also need to think hard and think together about how to move the AAA
away from the current 'weapons of mass destruction' business plan in
which its staff continues to look for profits by exploitating
copyrighted scholarly work unshaken by the fact that they have
consistently failed to keep our publishing program in the black. What do
the revenue structures look like? How can they be improved? What are
the costs and how are the decisions about these costs made? Are there
alternative forms of revenue, or ways to focus the energy of the AAA on
a different business plan?
What is Open Access?
Open Access is online, freely available, peer-reviewed research. It is
licensed in such a way that it protects the rights of the author, but
allows the work to circulate as freely as possible. It is fully
compatible with peer-review and publication in scholarly journals, and
there are increasingly a large number of fields whose most prestigious
journals have adopted open access policies.
Although OA literature is less expensive to produce than conventionally
published literature, but no one seriously believes that it is costless.
The goal of Open Access is not to pursue some utopian vision in the
hopes that our publication budgets are miraculously balanced. The
question is whether there are better ways to pay the bills than by
charging readers and creating barriers to accessing our work.
The stakes here are not just financial. Open Access Anthropology speaks
to the core ethical concerns of anthropology: a conviction that
researchers have a right to know and be known and, above all, that
people everywhere have a story that deserves to be told. How can
anthropologists work collaboratively with people who are unlikely to
have free access to the same body of knowledge that we do? How can
scholars in related (and distant) fields discover our work if it is
restricted only to a paying membership?
Would you like to learn more?
There will be an informal meeting to discuss Open Access on Saturday
the 18th, at a location near the convention center.
<-- time and place.
In the mean time, there are various ways you can be involved. Learn
about the issue by visiting
http://openaccessanthropology.org
There is also an Open Access email list that you can join if you want to
talk about these issues, or if you simply want to hear what other people
are saying. Just go to
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/open-access-anthropology/
And press the "join this group" link on the right hand side of the page.
$ENDING
-A
Kerim Friedman
Great work. Overall I think this is a fantastic job. I did, however,
make a few changes to the first section:
I felt that the letter could be jazzed up a bit by removing some
details about AnthroSource in the beginning, as I thought it got too
detailed. The goal is to motivate people to learn more and those who
want to know more can read this background on the wiki or learn by
attending the meeting. I also found the latin offputting. You don't
want to start an outreach letter with a phrase that a significant
portion of the audience might not know.
I hope this version is acceptable:
-----start--------
Open Access and the AAA
Scholarly societies are in crisis, and the AAA is among them.
Dwindling revenues from sales of AAA Journals are among the causes,
and if we don't staunch the bleeding now, we are warned, there will be
nothing left to give.
How has the AAA gotten to a point where its solvency seems to be based
solely on the sales of our scholarly work? Work that has already been
paid for by public and private granting agencies and universities, and
work we pay membership dues to present at a conference we pay
registration fees to attend? Why must we charge our readers in turn to
get access?
The AAA publicly voiced its opposition to Federal Legislation that
would require federally funded research to be freely available to the
people who paid for it: citizens. This public opposition is clearly
not in the interest of AAA members -- and the AnthroSource Steering
What is Open Access?
-- time and place.
http://openaccessanthropology.org
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/open-access-anthropology/
$ENDING
------end--------
- Kerim
Kwakk Wakk
wherever possible, and dump the Latin. Here are three slightly edited
sections:
1) we need a solid open access policy to make anthropological research
widely available;
2) we need a more transparent financial arrangement between the
association and its members;
3) we need a form of financial sustainability that does not compromise
our ability to disseminate our research.
---
We also need to think hard and think together about how to move the
AAA away from the current 'weapons of mass destruction' business plan,
which seeks profits by exploiting copyrighted scholarly work. If the
model worked, would the publishing program be losing money?
---
Although OA literature is less expensive to produce than
conventionally published literature, no one seriously believes that it
is costless.
[end]
kerim
I incorporated all of your changes, except I modified the last section
a bit to keep some of the original text while still making it a little
more spiffy.
How is this?
Kerim
[start]
Open Access and the AAA
Scholarly societies are in crisis, and the AAA is among them. Dwindling
revenues from sales of AAA Journals are among the causes, and if we
don't staunch the bleeding now, we are warned, there will be nothing
left to give.
How has the AAA gotten to a point where its solvency seems to be based
solely on the sales of our scholarly work? Work that has already been
paid for by public and private granting agencies and universities, and
work we pay membership dues to present at a conference we pay
registration fees to attend? Why must we charge our readers in turn to
get access?
The AAA publicly voiced its opposition to Federal Legislation that
would require federally funded research to be freely available to the
people who paid for it: citizens. This public opposition is clearly not
in the interest of AAA members -- and the AnthroSource Steering
Committee has publicly said as much, proposing a range of initiatives
to make our collective work more accessible. For this criticism, the
ASSC was dissolved.
Clearly, something needs to change.
1) we need a solid open access policy to make anthropological research
widely available;
2) we need a more transparent financial arrangement between the
association and its members;
3) we need a form of financial sustainability that does not compromise
our ability to disseminate our research.
We invite the sections and their members to start thinking creatively
about the solution to these problems. Digital publishing gives us the
technology to make our work widely available, so let's use it! Our
colleagues in the sciences and social sciences have already begun the
experiment, and we should critically examine their successes and
failures.
We also need to think hard and think together about how to move the AAA
away from the current 'weapons of mass destruction' business plan,
which seeks profits by exploiting copyrighted scholarly work. If the
model worked, would the publishing program be losing money?
What is Open Access?
Open Access is online, freely available, peer-reviewed research. It is
licensed in such a way that it protects the rights of the author, but
allows the work to circulate as freely as possible. It is fully
compatible with peer-review and publication in scholarly journals, and
there are increasingly a large number of fields whose most prestigious
journals have adopted open access policies.
Although OA literature is less expensive to produce than conventionally
published literature, no one seriously believes that it is costless.
The goal of Open Access is not to pursue some utopian vision where
profits don't matter, quite the opposite, but there are better ways to
pay the bills.
The stakes here are not just financial. Open Access Anthropology speaks
to the core ethical concerns of anthropology: a conviction that
researchers have a right to know and be known and, above all, that
people everywhere have a story that deserves to be told. How can
anthropologists work collaboratively with people who are unlikely to
have free access to the same body of knowledge that we do? How can
scholars in related (and distant) fields discover our work if it is
restricted only to a paying membership?
Would you like to learn more?
There will be an informal meeting to discuss Open Access on Saturday
the 18th, at a location near the convention center.
-- time and place.
In the mean time, there are various ways you can be involved. Learn
about the issue by visiting
http://openaccessanthropology.org
There is also an Open Access email list that you can join if you want
to talk about these issues, or if you simply want to hear what other
people are saying. Just go to
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/open-access-anthropology/
And press the "join this group" link on the right hand side of the
page.
$ENDING
[end]
Alex Golub
I think the letter looks ok -- there is one small grammatical error in
one paragraph, but I'll fix that up, proofread it, then then we can say
the content is fixed. The question is now what to do with it. Let me
propose the following:
1. We put this somplace public like a petition site and let AAA members
(and perhaps others) sign it.
2. We canvass our personal contacts and ask if they will 'sign' the
letter (i.e. allow us to add their name to the list).
3. On Monday, we send it off to the section leaders. I am sure that they
will all be checking email before they get on the plane
I think this allows us to 1) publicize the letter and 2) target it
specifically to section leaders who have a voice w/in AAA. If this is
copacetic to you all I will bite the bullet and come up w/a venue and
send the letter out. I really think we have to have a venue.
Ok let me know,
-A
Kerim Friedman
it to the sections right away. A lot of people do their e-mail catch
up over the weekend, or perhaps on Monday. If it gets sent to the
section members later than that I think most people won't read the
e-mail until they get back from the AAA. For this reason I suggest
sending it out ASAP and directly to the groups (rather than to the
section heads). If we want to do a petition to gather signatures we
can do that later, but I think we simply started too late to do
something like that for this AAA, and we need to make the best of it.
kerim
chris kelty
ck