Late to the party, but where do we stand?

[Greg Downey]

Dear Open Access-interested Anthro colleagues --

I'm not one of you stalwart advocates of open access and I'm no 'early
adopter' of anything, but my contact with PLoS has made me
increasingly envious of colleagues where OA is a reality. I'm just
wondering what the state of play is out there for OA Anthropology
journals? I've poked around online for a while, and it seems to me
that virtually all the OA Anthro journals are mostly student run, and
although there's some good pieces and some obvious hard work out
there, that just don't seem sustainable because of the obvious turn
over in direction as students move through.

Is there any concerted effort going on now to get a higher visibility
OA anthro journal? If so, can I volunteer my help. My
Neuroanthropology partner, Daniel Lende, will testify that I work like
a borrowed mule on a project that I care about (well, unless my wife's
horses interrupt), and I just think our field needs a good OA journal,
targeted at an academic but generalist audience.

I don't know where everyone else is in their careers and the like, but
I know I could commit not only to editing and reviewing, but also to
providing an article for consideration each year if getting content
was an issue.

I'm sure someone's said all this before, and I apologize for being an
'old' in the discussion, but we could even approach our senior
colleagues who are aware of the problems with journals in the AAA
stable, and maybe even talk one of the prominent B-grade journals to
become the new platform. I'd be happy to approach and negotiate if
there's one we can think of that might make a good partner -- it could
be a good way for a journal to revitalize its brand and with support
from online anthropologists, I suspect it wouldn't be hard to move a
journal up the anthropology food chain (the chain doesn't seem to go
very high in our field).

Can I help?
Greg Downey
greg....@mq.edu.au
http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/

[Christopher Kelty]

Greg,

Yes and no.  There has been some discussion recently with Kim Fortun apropos of her experience with Cultural Anthropology... I personally think CA and the SCA should take their journal and make it Open Access, with or without the blessing of the AAA... but the problem is politically daunting.  And different from starting a new journal, which is a different and less desirable option, but always on the table.

Are you coming to the AAA this year?  We should really plan an OA event of some kind...either official or agitprop/gate-crash style... maybe that is where you could direct your immediate mule energy...?

ck

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[Kerim Friedman]

I'm sure others will be able to better answer Greg's question, but I wanted to step back a bit and think about the big picture with regard to OAA, in the hope of sparking some more conversation before we get to New Orleans.

Initially we started OAA not only to pressure the AAA to move its journals towards an OA model, but also to educate anthropologists about OA because at the time the AAA leadership was actively opposing OA legislation in Congress. Later we discovered that many AAA journals supported self-archiving and focused our energy on encouraging greater OA by having more work available in academic repositories. With the collapse of Mana'o, we ended those efforts, and we've been a bit adrift as a movement ever since then. It is also worth mentioning a third aim of our movement which was to try to promote the creation of a repository for non-journal "grey matter" such as field notes and the like.

A high-quality OA anthropology journal would be great, but it would also be nice to see some movement forward on these earlier projects as well. I know our homepage is long overdue an overhaul…

http://openaccessanthropology.org/

http://blog.openaccessanthropology.org/the-aaa-and-open-access/

http://blog.openaccessanthropology.org/why-open-access/

Any volunteers?

Cheers,

Kerim

--

P. Kerim Friedman 傅可恩

Assistant Professor

Department of Indigenous Cultures

College of Indigenous Studies

National DongHwa University, TAIWAN

助理教授國立東華大學民族文化學系