Why this #AAAfail is Epic- How the American Anthropology Association is throwing the public under the bus and killing books for no good reason!

“Now that it is no longer mid-night and I have had a few hours of sleep I will better articulate why the American Anthropology Association AAA coming out in favor of a Research Works Act concept is an epic FAIL(internet slang) (my previous post was more emotion and less facts). Of course there  is the basic argument that the Research Works Act is an attempt by commercial publishers to keep US tax payers from accessing the results of research they paid for and is wrong. To be fair, the AAA does present a case, in their full response scholarly-pubs-(#282) davis, as to why they are against taxpayers accessing the research they pay for. As pointed out by Daniel... It gets worse, in the defense of not letting the public view research they paid for they say, ‘One final note: in anthropology and in the humanities, book-length publications is still a meaningful publication unit. Journals play a critical role in the success of these works be reviewing the books and publications. In 2010, AAA’s journals published 411 book reviews. If the AAA journal publishing program cannot be sustained, it may be that university presses and other scholarly publishers of book-length works could also be irreparably damaged.’ The real irony is that by defending journals the AAA is actually killing books. The prices of journals are increasing above inflation (estimated at 6-8% for 2012) and have so for decades. In the 1990′s when prices of journals were going up by 10% a year most library switch from spending 40% of their budgets on books to 30% while journals went form 60% to 70%. In 2002 “the ratio was roughly 83:17 serials to books” for universities in Australia. In 2007 the Southern Illinois University Carbondale only spent 10% of their library budget (all budgets are for acquisition and not total library budgets) on books and were worried that a raise in periodical prices would wipe out their book budget...”