Why An Open-Access Publishing Cooperative Can Work: A Proposal for the AAA’s Journal Portfolio — Cultural Anthropology

"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 (Schmid 2015). The new contract will begin on January 1, 2018 and will 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 its publishing program open-access: a cooperative model of scholarly publishing. This tailor-made design will cost the AAA nothing, while giving the organization a chance to be at the forefront of global innovation in scholarly communication. We urge the AAA to take our proposal seriously as it thinks about the future of its publishing program ..."