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

"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..."