Reinvigorating the OAA movement

[kerim]

Hi folks,

First some history: Back in 2005-2006 a few of us tried to make a call
to arms to push the AAA to adopt Open Access. Instead, the AAA went
the other way and openly opposed legislation that would mandate OA for
publicly funded research. At the 2006 AAA a bunch of us, including
some people from within the AAA, met and discussed the issue at the
annual meeting. The conclusion was that the AAA did already support
self-archiving, and so we would focus on educating and promoting self-
archiving among the membership. while continuing to lobby as best we
can for broader support for OA within the AAA. With that in mind we
set up this list and the OAA website and blog, as well as the self-
archiving how-to document which can be found there:

http://openaccessanthropology.org/
http://blog.openaccessanthropology.org/

Things pretty much drifted along, until Twitter hit the fan. Suddenly
anthropologists started organizing in a way I've never seen before.
Some new folks have come along to support OAA in various ways, and the
Open Anthropology Coop (OAC) was founded:

http://openanthcoop.ning.com/profiles/blogs/open-access-anthropology

All this seems to have sparked renewed interest in promoting OAA,
which is fantastic. However, I don't personally find the Ning website
to be very user friendly or conducive to strategizing and organizing.
Moreover we already have an existing community of 101 people on this
list, so I'm encouraging people to come over her and sign up if they
are interested in helping out.

So now what? That's really up to you all. I'd like to see ideas for
further educating the AAA membership about the issues involved in OA,
as well as why they should self-archive, as well as discussions about
how we can promote OA within the AAA. What shouldn't go here, however,
are discussions about transforming the AAA or creating alternative
structures. That belongs on the OAC/Ning website. The two of course
are related, but think of this as the educational wing of the Open
Anthropology movement!

More specifically, I'd like to see concrete plans for action at this
year's AAA. I won't be attending, but for those of you who are, and
who care about these issues, I think it would be good to start
planning early.

Cheers,

Kerim

[jkirk]

Ok folks--I'm not on Facebook or My space, and have no intention
of getting on them, but I sort of know what they are, from
hearsay. Now there's Twitter. Would someone please explain the
attraction of this one for anthropologists?

Thanks
Joanna

[Kerim Friedman]

Since this question is off-topic for this list, let me just provide
two links and ask that you contact me off list for further questions:

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/129319

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html?_r=1

Cheers,

Kerim

[jkirk]

Wait a minute, you brought it up: "Things pretty much drifted

along, until Twitter hit the fan.
> Suddenly anthropologists started organizing in a way I've never
> seen before. "

The alternet article says nothing about the relation you posited
between the appearance of Twitter and anthropologists organizing.
JK

[Jennifer Cool]

I see a lot in Joanna's question and exchange in this thread that speaks broadly to Kerim's initial question about how we might promote OA among AAA members. One is the issue of what type of posts are on-topic, another is the issue Kerim raised about being "user-friendly and conducive to strategizing and organizing."

While traffic on this list has been minimal, and I understand that well may be part of its charter, that makes the list itself less useful for discussion and organizing. If this isn't the place, where can we have a general discussion about what OA is and isn't? What kind of education is needed? How to do outreach beyond those already "in the know" and how to do something effective @ Philly AAAs?

The link between Twitter and anthropologists organizing Kerim noted is key. Off the cuff I'd point to http://wefollow.com/twitter/anthropologist where you can see all 30,821 Twitter users who describe themselves with the tag "anthropologist." These folks are finding each other and connecting in various ways and that shows the potential, if nothing specific re: organizing per se.

cheers, Jenny//

---------------------------
http://cool.org/portfolio/
Twitter: jennycool

[Kerim Friedman]

"where can we have a general discussion about what OA is and isn't?
What kind of education is needed? How to do outreach beyond those
already "in the know" and how to do something effective @ Philly
AAAs?"

As I said, these are all appropriate topics for discussion. My rule
for moderating this list is simple: maintain the link to OA in some
way. My point was that this isn't a list for bitching about the AAA,
which is what it could easily devolve into.

Kerim

[Christopher Kelty]

Organizing won't matter until we have some good ideas about what to do.  So...

Let me just say where I am at, since I have been involved for a long time in trying to make open access happen in anthropology

1.  Getting the AAA to go OA is, if not impossible, going to take longer than the life of the current AAA.

The current AAA staff is deliberately obstructionist, dim-witted and generally uncreative, regardless of how well meaning or positive they are about eventually going OA.  They are fighting to keep the AAA the way it has always been, and doing the entire discipline a grave disservice.  Right now, anthropologists, especially those just entering the profession, should be far more worried about a world without the AAA than whether their publications are OA or not.  I have always maintained that going OA will help invigorate the discipline, give it more visibility, reach a global audience, etc.  This falls on completely deaf ears at the AAA.

To be clear, the staff of the AAA is supposed to be governed by the AAA Executive Board, which is made up of academics who, the AAA staff will continually insist, make all the important decisions and have all the power.  This is true, but only at the level of making large scale, occasional (2-3 times a year) changes to AAA policy or bylaws.  They have no role in the day-to-day management of the publicationions arm of AAA.  Thus, the ability of AAA to go OA is constrained on the one side by the staff who claim that they can do nothing until the Governing Board makes a decision, and on the other by a Governing Board who claim that they do not micro-manage, or even direct, the actions of the staff.

2.  The biggest problem with OA right now is not whether the AAA journals are OA, but whether the OA journals are AAA-quality.  The only way to ensure this is for more and more people to submit articles to, peer review for, read and subscribe to OA journals. 

If we really wanted to organize, we would start a new OA journal that seeks to supplant AE  .  The amount of work involved (to say nothing of real costs, especially of labor and time for people to do this) is not trivial.  We have the technology, but most of us do not have the time.  Nonetheless, I think there are real opportunities here to enrich the world of research in anthropology at the same time as achieving some of the OA goals.

It might mean thinking outside the box.  What should journals look like in the future?  What should edited volumes look like?  Is there a middle ground, a third way or an alternative to the model we know now?  I've been involved in AnthroNow, which has a stalled online version that needs to get going... this is something that people here could become involved in, and something that needs help defining itself--is it academic journal, a magazine, a blog?  What makes research have an impact and how can we work on achieving that via OA?

3.  OA should be a means, not an end. 

It won't help anyone to have everything be OA if there aren't still metrics of quality, standards of practice and bellwethers of new research areas and problems.  Anthropology is a fractured discipline, but within those fractures are lots of vibrant sub-communities that need to find ways to make both OA and Anthropology work for them.  I think of the "neuroanthropology" group or the "anthroplogy of the contemporary project" or media anthroplogy as such vibrant subfields.  There are many others.  They need organizing within them to make OA part of their mission the way, for instance, Jason Jackson has made it part of the mission for museum anthropology. 

These are some preliminary thoughts.  I second Kerim's notion that there are multiple channels for organization, and that's fine... not everyone has to be part of everything.  But there is strength in knowing that all these different groups are aiming at shared goals, rather than re-inventing the wheel.  A core part of organizing therefore should be defining some partially shared goals and finding multiple ways to achieve them.

ck

[Alexandre Enkerli]

Is there an OAC group to b*tch about the AAA? If so, diverting traffic
there and monitoring the discussion for topics related to OA might be
an efficient strategy.

Alex
http://www.informalethnographer.com/

[Kerim Friedman]

Thanks to Chris Kelty for his thoughtful post.

I wanted to respond to his first point: "Getting the AAA to go OA is,

if not impossible, going to take longer than the life of the current
AAA."

I agree that we shouldn't wast time on the AAA *leadership*, but we
can do a lot to change views among the AAA *membership*. I think we
should start perhaps by reaching out to medical and biological
anthropologists who might care strongly about something like HR 801.
See here for more details:

http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/

In my experience, the leadership of individual AAA sections often
support OA, but do little to promote it. I think we can do a lot to
give them the tools and information they need to see how to promote it
within their sections.

Cheers,

Kerim

[jkirk]

I went here http://openaccessanthropology.org/ and read about
self-archiving online via pdfs.
I recently uploaded to my website some articles I wrote that are
on my CDR, published 5 years ago,
about which only one reviewer said anything, and that was about
only one article (I call them "Readings"). Figured maybe putting
them on my website might find more readers who don't have to pay
to read my stuff.

So IMO I have been putting some of my stuff up for open access.
Planning to add more.
Looking at this link, http://openaccessanthropology.org/ , I see
that self-archiving refers to making a pdf and putting it
somewhere. Please reserve your guffaws, but I don't know how to
make a pdf, and anyway if my stuff is on my website, which can be
found via google, isn't that adequate?

My website is titled The Ricksha Arts of Bangladesh,
www.artsricksha.com , and the articles I mentioned (above) are on
the Readings page. Maybe if I study openaccessanthro long enough
I'll be able to figure out what self-archiving means.

Cheers,

Joanna



-----Original Message-----
From: open-access-...@googlegroups.com
[mailto:open-access-...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of
kerim
Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 1:44 AM

[Kerim Friedman]

Joanna,

This is actually a very good question, one which I don't even know if
I can adequately answer. However, I do know one thing, which is that
for articles published in journals some publishers limit your rights
as to what you can post and where. Self-archiving in institutional
repositories, like the one we promote on that website, are allowed by
many journals, including most of those run by the AAA. There are some
limitations, which is why we link to a tool which can tell you what
those limitations are. Many publishers look the other way at hosting
articles on your own website, but that doesn't mean that doing so is
actually allowed by the publisher. These are complex issues and we
need to do a better job of educating people about them. I hope other
list members can help elaborate on this and suggest ways we can make
this complex issue easier to understand.

Cheers,

Kerim

[Kerim Friedman]

Another reason to use an institutional repository, as opposed to (or
in addition to) posting on your own web site, is that the material is
filed by a professional archivist, with all the appropriate metadata
that a librarian would want to know about your article. This is great
for working with search engines, as well as bibliographic software
(EndNote, Zotero, Mendely, Sente, etc.). Also, some of these sites are
able to talk to each other, and even do things like track references
between articles. So if you link to other OA articles I might be able
to click through to them directly from the website. A lot of this
stuff is still in development, but the potential is there. Already,
Google Scholar has become an invaluable tool.

Cheers,

Kerim

[Jarvis, Hugh]

Very sensible comments, Kerim. Although I'm not quite sure who this illusive "AAA leadership" is... Most humans I interact with generally share the same goals. It's the issue of funding that is the real challenge. Open Access isn't actually free....

Cheers,
Hugh

[Jason Baird Jackson]

Hello everyone. I am "in the field" right now and also twelve days
away from being department chair and, more importantly for this
context, NOT being editor of Museum Anthropology. I am exhausted by
managing the conflicts of interest built into trying to work toward a
better scholarly communications system while living enclosed within
the Wiley/AAA publications program. In the days ahead I will be an
active conversation partner and a voice for the cause of open access.
I will be prepared too, I think, to show clearly on the basis of
empirical evidence how open access (gold and green) is, of course, not
free but how gold open access is staggeringly less expensive (and more
open) than the current toll access, commercial publisher-based
approach and how it does not require resentment and resistance-
generating corporate enclosures of public resources. Paying the bills
entailed in having a late 20th century-style scholarly society is the
big question hiding within Hugh's assertion that OA isn't free.
Outside the AAA I am involved in work aimed at addressing this much
more difficult to solve problem and will be able to speak of this too
more openly in the days ahead.

Best wishes from Oklahoma,

Jason

> > On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 1:14 PM, Jennifer Cool <c...@usc.edu> wrote:
>
> >> I see a lot in Joanna's question and exchange in this thread that speaks
> >> broadly to Kerim's initial question about how we might promote OA among AAA
> >> members. One is the issue of what type of posts are on-topic, another is the
> >> issue Kerim raised about being "user-friendly and conducive to strategizing
> >> and organizing."
>
> >> While traffic on this list has been minimal, and I understand that well
> >> may be part of its charter, that makes the list itself less useful for
> >> discussion and organizing. If this isn't the place, where can we have a
> >> general discussion about what OA is and isn't? What kind of education is
> >> needed? How to do outreach beyond those already "in the know" and how to do
> >> something effective @ Philly AAAs?
>
> >> The link between Twitter and anthropologists organizing Kerim noted is

> >> key. Off the cuff I'd point tohttp://wefollow.com/twitter/anthropologist

> ...
>
> read more »