Innovation in Open Access Publishing

"Open access publishing is a frontier, but it is a frontier that is too often constrained by discussions based in activist or anti-market views about information distribution and the role of government. I prefer to view open access as a laboratory for innovation. I agree government-funded research should be widely and easily accessible, but I don’t believe there is one simple way forward. Instead I embrace those entities and people that are innovating new open access models. Further, the models needs to move more rapidly beyond journals and into monographs, archives and other digital items. I believe open access should be engaged as a business model; the end result being more and better types of content freely available to students and researchers as a result of entrepreneurialism, innovation and the very best of governmental and private sector thinking coming to bear on the opportunity. In this column I will describe a recent initiative to bring open access to a new Alexander Street anthropology archive and then introduce recent efforts in open access monograph and journal publishing from the University of California Press and Ubiquity Press ... At Alexander Street, we have long seen making silent voices heard a central component of our mission. In the field of anthropology, we know that the seminal ethnographies of the twentieth century that defined the discipline are underpinned by an enormous volume of unpublished and un-digitized field notes, photos and other forms of ephemera. Our standard business practice has been to select such un-digitized content and then to digitize, index and make salable; but the sheer volume of content in the corpus of twentieth century ethnography makes this nearly impossible, thus our exploration into open access alternatives. When we scanned the landscape of open access offerings in archives we found the vast majority to be government or institution-funded; the stand-out exception being the offerings of Reveal Digital, such the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee Digital Archive, 1960-1969. Reveal Digital uses a sales threshold approach that is based on establishing a revenue target after which the archive becomes open to all. This, of course, relies on the largesse and good will of the well-funded and/or philanthropic to bring important archives open to the world.  At Alexander Street, we are bringing forth a new open access model for archive publication. Our new collection, Anthropological Fieldwork Online, will bring open access archival content to the world by merging 'for fee' and 'for free' content into a single offering. Based on the preference of the many archives we are working with to digitize their field notes of anthropologists such as Victor Turner, Margaret Mead and Bronislaw Malinowski, we will we present three alternatives side-by-side in one offering: for fee (traditional purchase or subscription), hybrid (for fee for a period of three to seven years and then freely open) and sponsored open access on publication ..."