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No More Half-measures: Anthropology must Take Responsibility for Open Access

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About the author: Andrew Asher is an Anthropologist and the Assessment Librarian at Indiana University Bloomington.  Prior to joining Indiana University, Andrew was the Scholarly Communications Officer at Bucknell University. Andrew also serves as a Content Editor on OANow’s Editorial Board.

Like many anthropologists, I was first excited, but then disappointed, by the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) announcement of its new journal, Open Anthropology, in November 2013.  

While I hoped Open Anthropology would represent an open access publication venue for new anthropological research, its mission is much narrower.  Open Anthropology will republish old content from other AAA publications that will be selected by the journal editors for its relevance to current policy discussion and usefulness to a broad audience.  This content is supposedly intended to be open access, but contrary to what its name implies, the AAA press release states that Open Anthropology will have  “a specific policy. . .on ‘ungating’ and perhaps ‘re-gating’ content after a certain period of time.”  If this is the case, then Open Anthropology is not really open access.

While the goal of making previously published anthropological research more visible and accessible to the public is important, and one I fully support, Open Anthropology is disappointing because it represents a half-measure effort that gestures towards open access without committing to it, and comes from a scholarly society that should be a leader in the open access movement rather than shirking its responsibilities.

The internal contradictions contained in Open Anthropology’s press release are symptomatic of a professional organization whose leadership and membership have sometimes pursued progressive open scholarship initiatives, such as ensuring that all AAA journals allow authors to self-archive their manuscripts (“green” open access), making back issues (over 35 years old) of American Anthropologist freely available, and partnering with SSRN to found the Anthropology and Archeology Research Network, but have also sometimes been profoundly reactionary to open access advocacy efforts.  For example, in the AAA’s official response to the Office of Science and technology Policy’s (OSTP) request for information on Public Access to Scholarly Publications, the AAA’s then-Executive Director William Davis III absurdly claimed, “We know of no research that demonstrated a problem with the existing system for making content of scholarly journals available to those who might benefit from it,” and even asserted that the AAA viewed funder-mandated open access as an “unconstitutional taking of private property.”

The controversy that followed the release of this letter suggested that Davis did not necessarily speak for all members to the association (indeed, Tom Boellstorff,  editor of American Anthropologist, wrote that he knew of no AAA journal editors who were consulted), and  despite frustrations such as these,  I have come to believe that because they operate on a disciplinary scale scholarly societies are presently one of the most effective locations from which to pursue open access.  For example, converting all of the AAA’s 22 journals to open access would make a tremendous amount of anthropological scholarship instantaneously available to a worldwide audience, and would eliminate the need for AAA authors to individually post their manuscripts in open access repositories—a step that far too few US scholars take, whether it be because of confusion over rights, the lack of an available repository, or just benign neglect and apathy (after a frustrating year and a half of attempting to persuade authors to comply with a “green” open access institutional mandate, I am convinced that relying on individual scholars to make content open access is not the most effective way forward).   Furthermore, as a discipline that depends on the generosity of uncompensated interlocutors and research participants, the AAA has an ethical obligation to pursue open access for its publications as American Anthropologist.

According to the AAA’s 2012 Statement on Ethics, “Anthropologists should not withhold research results from research participants, especially when those results are shared with others. “  Publishing content behind pay walls is a significant barrier to sharing research results with the communities anthropologists work with, and is in direct contradiction to this ethical principle.  If we take seriously the importance of pursuing research that engages the people and communities with which we work, then as a scholarly society the AAA must take seriously the importance of open access to its journals.

The AAA’s leadership has responded to this argument by asserting that the economics of its journal publishing program dictate a subscription-based funding model and prevent transitioning journals to open access.  Until recently, very little evidence was offered to support this claim.  However, in Sept. 2012, the AAA released a Publishing Program Analysis it commissioned from the Chain Bridge Group (note: accessible only to AAA members) which provided detailed financial figures for each of the AAA journals and included several forecasting scenarios for both subscription-based and open access funding models.  While this report is sobering in that it suggests that the AAA’s publishing program is not sustainable even under a the current subscription-based model, it also shows that some of the AAA’s journals could be transitioned to open access with very modest increases to membership dues (note: if you are a AAA member, please read this report. Since it’s labeled “proprietary and confidential,” I can’t quote all of the details here).

In order to respond to both the ethical obligation of making anthropological research freely available and to the responsibility to ensure the long term economic sustainability of the organization, I believe that the AAA’s leadership and membership should take the following steps in support of open access anthropology:

  1.  The AAA should immediately found a flagship open access journal for new anthropological research, or expand the mission of Open Anthropology to include new peer-reviewed content.

According to the AAA, one of the reasons for founding Open Anthropology is to provide insight into the financial sustainability of open access publication models.   It is therefore difficult to understand why a more appropriate experiment would not be to establish a journal that publishes new content and requires fully functioning peer review and editorial workflows.  Jason Baird Jackson has already demonstrated this is possible and sustainable for a specialized discipline with Museum Anthropology Review, while Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory is pursuing a similar model aimed at a more general anthropology audience.

2. In preparation for the next round of contract negotiations with Wiley-Blackwell (which presently publishes the AAA’s journal portfolio under a contract that expires in 2017), the AAA should establish and promote forums for open and frank discussion and evaluation of the finances of its journal publishing program.

Open access publishing is not free, and the AAA membership should debate what it is willing to sacrifice in order to meet its self-determined ethical obligations.  Given the apparent unsustainability of the AAA’s present publishing program, this discussion must take place even if one disagrees with a transition to open access publishing.  In order to enable this discussion, the AAA should release detailed financial information about its journals for independent analysis by its members.   This debate should also include an evaluation of the business relationship between the AAA and Wiley-Blackwell.  Specifically, the AAA membership should ask itself if it desires to continue doing business with a corporation that reaps a 79% gross profit margin (according to its 2011 annual report, see page 22) on academic publishing that relies heavily on subsidies from the unpaid labor of authors, editors and peer reviewers, and which actively lobbies in support of the Fair Copyright in Research Act, a bill that is designed to overturn the National Institute of Health’s successful public access policy.

3. Depending on the outcome of #2, the AAA should begin taking steps to prepare to transition all of its journals to open access at the end of its present contract with Wiley-Blackwell.

While I believe transitioning all of the AAA’s journals to an open access model is ethically the right thing for the association to do, the membership may decide that it is not financially possible, especially given its reliance on revenue from a small number of journal titles.  However, at the very least the AAA should plan to make open access the journal titles that its Publishing Program Analysis report identified as possible to transition to open access with negligible effect on the association’s operating costs.

4. AAA members who support open access should make it a voting issue in AAA leadership elections.

A transition to open access publishing for the AAA will be a lengthy process that will require support across multiple leadership cycles.  In order to affect a transition to open access, the AAA membership must demand that the association leadership make it a priority.

There should be no more half measures for the AAA.  Anthropological research should be accessible for students, scholars, the people and communities where we conduct research, and the public at large, regardless of their ability to pay subscription fees or their affiliation with a library or university that can.  Transitioning to open access is therefore the only tenable ethical position for the future of the AAA publishing program.


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