Description | open access in anthropology and beyond

pontika.nancy@gmail.com's bookmarks 2014-09-14

Summary:

"The workshop seeks to address current debates revolving around the promotion of Open Access to research outputs and the ways in which these debates concern the work of anthropologists specifically and of social scientists more generally. This workshop will provide a forum in which to discuss issues relating to the channels through which we disseminate our work while enabling us to draw links between the issue of Open Access and debates about our audiences and how we communicate with them. In addition, the workshop will explore the ways in which ethnographic research on Open Access can enhance public debates concerning the opening up of access to the outputs of publicly funded research and contribute to shaping the nature of scholarly work. Open Access is currently a widely discussed topic within public arenas across the world, engaging academics, publishers, sponsors and politicians in controversial yet crucial dialogues. Under the rubric of 'Open Access,' numerous voices have demanded that research, especially when it is publicly funded, be made freely available to any reader at the point of use with the only barrier of internet access (see the definition of Open Access provided by the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative). The underlying motivation to promote free of charge and unrestricted access to research results is to enrich the research process as well as to enhance its impact. Facilitated by the development of digital technologies and in order to open up access to information, innovative instruments have been created (open source software, free software licences, and so on). Crucially, Open Access initiatives have proliferated in the new millennium in countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia, where governments and public sponsors have manifested their determination to enforce Open Access. In countries as variegated as Spain, Peru and Argentina, Open Access has been recently enforced through legislative efforts. Yet in contrast to the Anglo-American world, in Spain as well as in much of Latin America there exists a long tradition of Open Access publications, whose exploration can bear important lessons for new Open Access initiatives. Whereas a number of events have recently been held on the subject of Open Access as it concerns the publishing industry and scholarly work broadly speaking, these events have not addressed the specific concerns of anthropologists (an exception to this would be the roundtable entitled 'The Politics of Publishing in Academia and Beyond', held at the recent 2013 EASA-AAA joint meeting of the Medical Anthropology Network, which was limited in scope). Various anthropologists have however engaged in discussions that analyse the implications of Open Access for scholarly work (see Kelty et al. 2008; Miller 2012; Zeitlyn and Lyon 2012) and in ethnographic research on the practice of various aspects related to Open Access (for instance, conducting research among developers and users of open source software, see for instance Coleman 2004, 2009, 2010a; Coleman et al. 2005; Karanović 2012; Leach et al. 2009). These works provide a ground on which to discuss not only how to provide wide access to publicly funded research but also about the nature of scholarly work and its public functions and responsibilities. It is on this ground that we want to locate the discussion that the workshop will promote and deliver. The event we propose will be innovative in three chief ways ..."

Link:

http://openaccessmadrid2014.wordpress.com/workshop/rationale-and-aims/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » pontika.nancy@gmail.com's bookmarks
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.asia oa.latin_america oa.spain oa.policies oa.publishing oa.debates oa.anthropology oa.new ru.sparc oa.events oa.south oa.ssh oa.ssh

Date tagged:

09/14/2014, 07:57

Date published:

09/14/2014, 10:08