anthropologies: We are the One Percent:Open Access in the Era of Occupy Wall Street

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-08-20

Summary:

“Challenged to write on the place where the open access (Suber 2012) and Occupy movements (Occupy Wall Street 2012) meet, I immediately started composing (in my head) a string of disgruntled, rhetorical questions... How it is that the same scholars who can produce such nuanced, complex, critical accounts of the workings of power and capital, of mediascapes, of speculation, of neoliberalism, of privatization and enclosure, of circulation, of exploitive labor practices, of union-busting, of social change, of technology, of educational practices, of inequality, of law, of injustice, of everything that matters—past and present—could seemingly be so out of touch when it comes to the political economy of the scholarly publishing system to which they contribute free labor as editors and peer-reviewers, through which they circulate their research findings, and from which their scholarly organizations increasingly extract rents that their home institutions, their students, and their societies cannot afford (and should not need) to pay? ... Commercial scholarly publishers and their scholarly society partners regularly point to their philanthropic initiatives designed to expand access to the scholarly literature in the ‘developing world.’ Such initiatives include HINARI (health topics), AGORA (agriculture topics), and OARE (environmental topics). On top of such widely participated-in initiatives, the American Anthropological Association (2012) has created a unique one of its own, targeting Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Tribal Colleges, and First Nations Colleges in the U.S. and Canada... These programs aim to provide access to the scholarly literature for those students and faculty at work in institutions of higher education (mainly in the developing world) that otherwise would not (for lack of financial resources) have access to toll access scholarly publications... [if] every student and faculty member in the so-called "developed world" had complete, paid-for access to the entire toll access scholarly literature. Even those who have the privilege of working or studying at elite research universities in the United States know that this dream is far from realized and that there is little hope that the toll access system will provide anything approaching access to the whole of the scholarly literature. Despite the best efforts of the commercial publishers to deny the serials crisis, the warning signs are everywhere. College and university librarians do triage work everyday trying to figure out what databases, journals, books, and disciplines to abandon so as to be able to continue providing others. (For the state of these issues, see Fitzpatrick 2011.)... For special purposes, what I have just imagined is a kind of utopia built out of the toll access publishing system that we already have. In summary, it would be like this. Every student and faculty member in the developed world gets access to the whole of the scholarly literature because they are affiliated with an institution that can and does have the capacity to pay (vast sums) for this literature as provided for by a mix of mostly small not-for-profit publishers and (primarily) very large, very profitable commercial publishers. Up until the time that their home countries move out of the category "developing" and into the category "developed," students and faculty in places like Angola and Bangladesh would gain access, where necessary, from philanthropic initiatives supported by this publishing community. If such an impossible vision were achieved, it would still be terrible... I calculated that the global population of university people was about 2%-3%. In toll access utopia, these are the people who have access to scholarship. The 97%-98% would not (except through pay-per-view options that only the most economically advantaged could afford). Given that we do not have such a utopia now and that it seems unachievable any time soon, then it follows that the percentage of people with something approximating good access to scholarship (and I am one of these fortunate few) is surely more like 1%.  Especially for a field that studies, and relies upon the goodwill of, people (the 99%) and that aspires to be, and certainly can be, engaging, accessible, and useful outside the groves of academe, the reality of 1% access and the dream of 3% access should be absolutely unacceptable (Kelty et al. 2008:564). In a world filled with lifelong learners seeking knowledge, desperate social problems needing redress, rapid cultural change to be negotiated, and nearly boundless deprivation and suffering, we have unprecedented need for an anthropological scholarship that is widely and freely available. Open access activists are addressing this problem and finding new ways to get the job done. Whatever else they are doing, the major commercial publishers and their allies are working to defend their market share, a profitable status quo, and their dominance over the key nodes in the scholarly communications commodity chain... Those working to make open access journals, open access repositor

Link:

http://www.anthropologiesproject.org/2012/03/we-are-one-percent-open-access-in-era.html?m=1

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.anthropology oa.aaa oa.green oa.advocacy oa.societies oa.south oa.libraries oa.prices oa.budgets oa.hinari oa.agora oa.oare oa.repositories oa.research4life oa.journals oa.ssh oa.ssh

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

08/20/2012, 14:42

Date published:

03/04/2012, 11:47