Open Folklore, Open Access, and the Future of Scholarly Publishing | Archivology

"When the American Folklore Society (AFS) and the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries announced the Open Folklore project, it was hailed as a model for scholarly publishing in the humanities. It is promoting open access publishing, branding various open access projects, and working through traditional channels to make much folklore content available online as possible. Old publishing meets new publishing for the benefit of folklore....The distributed approach to all these initiatives made me a little nervous at first, but I’ve since been convinced of the advantages to this method....It’s genius, really. In a world of online portals, silos, domains, and networks, we almost assume that some kind of enclosure is required to facilitate communication and access to information. But those enclosures are increasingly dominated by complex copyright and intellectual property legislation and costly agreements with large, for-profit enterprises that do not always have the same priorities as the authors they publish or their readers. What better remedy for this toxic situation than to go outside the box, to tackle the big problem with smaller, easier-to-manage actions towards a common purpose. ‘Choose your battles’ was never such a fitting colloquialism. I’m especially encouraged by Open Folklore because of what its model could mean for the future of scholarly publishing in general...."