American Anthropological Association keeps it from the people | john hawks weblog

“Last month, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy solicited comments concerning open access publication policies for federally funded research. I submitted a comment to a related solicitation, concerning open access to data from federally funded research (‘Public interests in data from federally funded research’). But the open access publication comments are also interesting to me, and the OSTP has just released the full list of comments to the public (‘Public Access to Scholarly Publications: Public Comment’). Included in the list is a comment written on behalf of the American Anthropological Association by its executive director, William E. Davis, III (PDF of comment). The letter is a defense of closed-access journal policies, and includes many statements that I view as disputable. For example, Davis addressed the embargo period for open access to journal articles. The NIH access policy allows this embargo period for journals to restrict exclusive access to subscribers for 12 months after publication. First, after twelve months much of the content in many STM fields is old news. An embargo period of 12 months often has little effect on the financial models upon which publishing in STM fields is based. In anthropology, however, where over 90 percent of downloads occur after 12 months from the date of publication and the cited half-life of our quarterly journals is over 10 years, a 12 month embargo period does nothing to hep protect our subscriptions. May I offer an alternative view of this problem? I suggest that the closed access policy has contributed to the irrelevance of AAA journals. Nobody outside the AAA membership notices when papers of note are published there. The AAA journals, including American Anthropologist have effectively cut themselves off from the rest of the academic world. The "half-life" is high not because new papers are steadily building more citations, but instead because their impact is anommalously slight compared to papers from 50 years ago... The American Anthropological Association over the past several years has shaped policies that keep peer-reviewed AAA publications accessible only by members and large institutional subscribers. Past and ongoing journal issues are walled within the Association's ‘AnthroSource’ archive, available with association membership or to institutional subscribers for a hefty fee. In 2007, when the AAA more than doubled the institutional subscription prices for its flagship journals, I ran some numbers on open access publication. Even using high-end price schemes, it was clear that open access electronic journals could be provided free worldwide for an annual cost of $10 per AAA member...”