Open access anthropology needs a civil service

"Open access anthropology needs a civil service, a staff, a personnel. For Big Content, it’s easy: hire and pay staff with the money you’ve received for charging professors to read the work they themselves have written. For open access anthropology, finding a staff to proselytize and educate open access is difficult — finding people to actually edit and produce publications is even more difficult. The two key factors involved are time and money, and so far anthropology’s usual solutions to these problems have not been working out. The professional association of most anthropologists, the AAA, has failed the discipline. Attempts to shift paradigm from paper to digital publishing revealed the association’s underlying lack of capacity: unable to successfully tap or organize volunteer human resources, the AAA could only run its website and publications by hiring outside contractors to do so. When the cost was too great, they mortgaged our content to keep their journals afloat. As a result anthropology, like many disciplines, now exists in two worlds: a for-pay, exclusionary professionalized world and a volunteer, open-access, nonprofit one...."