Opening Access: Publics, Publication, and a Path to Inclusion — Cultural Anthropology

"For many years, members of the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA), as well as our executive board and editors, have been interested in pursuing an open-access option for our flagship publication, Cultural Anthropology. The decision was not up to the SCA alone, as we are a section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), which maintains a contract with Wiley-Blackwell to publish the journals of more than twenty of its sections. In August 2012, the AAA director of publications, Oona Schmid, proposed that one of the publishing sections be permitted to become open access for the duration of the Wiley-Blackwell contract, which expires in December 2017. Our board formed a task force, including some real experts on publishing and open access, and the group determined that it would be worthwhile to pursue this possibility. As it happened, we were the only AAA section that raised its hand, so we were authorized to make the transition. What you see before you is the result of the collective work of a diverse set of actors interested in producing Cultural Anthropology as an open-access journal ..."