Why an open access publishing cooperative can work: A proposal for the AAA's journal portfolio | Corsín Jiménez | HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) has recently announced that it will soon issue a Request for Proposals (RFP) to invite potential publishers to bid for the business of managing the association’s publishing program (see Schmid 2015). The new contract would begin January 1, 2018 and likely run for the next ten years. Because the AAA is the world’s largest publisher of anthropology titles (twenty-one journals and Anthropology News), this new publishing contract will shape the discipline’s public image and scholarly communications for years to come. At this critical juncture we must ask: Will AAA publications spend yet another decade locked within a publisher website where only research libraries can afford to purchase them? Or can our scholarly work join the growing body of research that is publicly available and accessible as a public good? In this piece we propose a concrete, practical, and financially sustainable way that the AAA can make their publishing program open access: a cooperative model of scholarly publishing. This tailor-made design will cost the AAA nothing, and give the AAA a chance to be at the forefront of global innovation in scholarly communication. We urge the AAA to take it seriously as they think about the future of their publishing program.

Our proposal draws on the expertise of two of the world’s most reputed open access advocacy organizations: the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP). Both organizations have agreed to commit time, money, and resources to help the AAA transition to wards an open access publishing ecology: SPARC is willing to carry out a financial and data analysis of the AAA’s publishing program at no expense to the association, while PKP is willing to design a web tool to model the AAA’s new multi-stakeholder ecology of open access publishing. The specifics of PKP and SPARC’s proposal will be sent directly to the AAA, since some of the financial information is sensitive. Here, we would like to talk about the general model that we are suggesting.