Category Archives: oa.anthropology

Editors’ note: On rent extraction in academic publishing and its alternatives | Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society

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Abstract:  In this editorial we introduce new members of our editorial team and the contents of this issue. In addition we discuss open access developments of the journal, namely our new license policy, which allows authors to choose a Creative Common license that best suits their needs or the requirements of their funders. This change in licenses makes our journal also compliant with the Plan S programme, which several large European research funders have signed, in order to promote open access publishing. We support such initiatives, but note that they are designed mainly to push large commercial publishers to publish publicly funded research in open access. While the Plan S is a welcome program, commercial for-profit publishers charge exorbitant charges for open access, usually paid for by the researchers’ institutions. We note that these charges are a form of rent extraction, which produces little added value, as the commercial publishers rely on the free labor of researchers and publicly funded research to fill their journals’ pages. More so, due to these charges the public ends up paying again for the research it funded in the first place. We argue that public support for both institutional and independent non-profit open access publishing is a socially more just and sustainable model.

AAA Publishing Looks Toward the (Murky) Future – Anthropology News

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“As a committee, we have discussed various business models for open access, from transformative agreements like the one between Elsevier and the University of California system to the Subscribe to Open model now being implemented at Berghahn and Annual Reviews. We have begun to consider a more federated approach to AnthroSource that would bring together AAA content from multiple sources, inspired by the work of the Next Generation Library Publishing project. Over the past decade, different iterations of the PFC have also thought about the possibility of creating a larger mega-journal composed of Sections corresponding to some of the subfields represented in our current portfolio….

The second step of the process will be to engage a third-party scholarly communication consultant to assist in plotting out scenarios for a sustainable future for the AAA publishing program. Experience with a range of open access models and a demonstrated understanding of the challenges facing social science society publishers will be our primary considerations in selecting a consultant. A consultant who sees the advantages of partnering with different types of publishers will be given the highest consideration. The committee regards the results of the self-study as critical to the consultant’s work, and we will request that prospective consultants outline a process for reaching out to and collaborating with the Sections. It is the PFC’s hope that the consultant will be able to provide each publishing section with a clearer understanding of not only a future for their journal but also of the portfolio as it moves toward a more open future.”

OEA Call for applications: Editor – Google Docs

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“The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology (OEA, formerly Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology) is looking for new Managing Editors.

 
The OEA is a peer reviewed, open-access internet encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology for the general public. It focuses on undergraduate and postgraduate students across the social sciences and humanities, as well as corporate and policy researchers. Its purpose is to introduce this public to basic concepts in the field of Social and Cultural Anthropology. The OEA does this by publishing engaging expert introductions on topics that have been the focus of substantial research and debate by anthropologists. All entries are peer-reviewed by at least three expert academics, making the OEA one of the most reliable anthropological resources on the web….”

Yes, Scholar-Publishers Can Make Common Cause After All | Allegra Lab

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by Anne Brackenbury Last spring, I began work with the open access advocacy group, Libraria, as a Community Convener to help organize a mutual aid network amongst a group of open access publications in anthropology and adjacent fields. Cooperate for Open (or C4O, as this network is affectionately known), is motivated by the idea that there is a wide variety of open access models suitable for different contexts and scales. In the case of C4O the focus is on small, scholar-led, open access publications that consistently find themselves — sometimes deliberately — on the margins of scholarly publishing. I wrote a piece for Allegra Lab about the rationale behind the project when I began this contract, wondering whether (and hoping that) scholar-publishers could make common cause. Now, as my work winds down, it seems as good a time as any to offer my answer to that question. […]  

AAA’s Response to OSTP Public Accessibility Memo – News – Stay Informed

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“The American Anthropological Association (AAA) supports the basic objective of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s (OSTP’s) recent decision to make federally funded research freely available without embargo. AAA has been publishing scholarly content since 1889 and has always advocated for equitable access to research and data while maintaining an inclusive and sustainable publishing program….

AAA also has a flexible reuse policy as part of its author agreement. Authors can use the published article of record for educational or other scholarly purposes at the author’s own institution or company and/or place the accepted, post peer-review manuscript on a personal, institutional, or company website or on a non-commercial, discipline-specific public server….”

Brill Transforms “Historische Anthropologie” to Open Access in Collaboration with the FWF

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Brill, the international scholarly publisher, is proud to announce the agreement with the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) which will transform the journal Historische Anthropologie/Historical Anthropology to full Open Access by 2025.

No Open Access Today, Anthropology: On the latest AAA-Wiley Announcement | anthro{dendum}

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“After years of back and forth, it seemed that the AAA was finally going to make the shift to Open Access. But, the cheering didn’t last long. According to the recent announcement from the AAA, the move to open access is going to wait a bit longer (again). Why? Because the association has, once again, decided to continue its partnership with Wiley-Blackwell….

So they took a year, got input from many sources, including the Publishing Futures Committee and the Executive Board, drafted an RFP for potential publishers, and then evaluated those proposals. The result? According to AAA Executive Director Ed Liebow, “Wiley best aligned with the core values of the AAA’s publishing program – quality, breadth, accessibility, equity, and sustainability.”

It is completely unclear how that decision was actually made. …”

 

AAA Renews Partnership with Wiley Publishing – News – Stay Informed

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“The American Anthropological Association (AAA) today renewed its agreement with Wiley Publishing, a leader in research and education with offices across the globe. The agreement continues a 15-year partnership that began in 2007.

Wiley will continue to host AAA’s portfolio of 20+ anthropology journals, including American Anthropologist, the association’s flagship publication as well as AnthroSource, AAA’s online portal. AnthroSource is the premier database of full-text anthropology articles, serving the research and teaching needs of scholars and practitioners in the United States and around the world.

The new agreement offers seamless access to AAA members, streamlined production processes, resources for journal editors (including ScholarOne access), and a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as accessible content. Wiley will also provide an array of technological innovations and enhancements, including support for smart templates, smart editing tools, subject keyword taxonomy, and shift from page-centric design….

Careful consideration was given with an understanding that moving toward more open access content is the long-term goal. “Wiley’s ambitious roadmap for increasing its transitional deals will open more content while assuring the resources are there to adequately support high quality scholarship across the breadth of anthropology’s disciplinary terrain,” according to Liebow. Open access to the Association’s publications remains available to tribal colleges, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and Palestinian institutions of higher education. Cultural Anthropology is freely available worldwide and subsidized by the partnership agreement. The Open Anthropology Research Repository is an open gateway to scholarship and related research materials in any language and many file formats….”

“Care, Control, and the Politics of Access: Ethnographic Research and Open Data” March 23, 09-10am (GMT-6) | Open Scholar Café, Iowa State University

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Calls for open data often center supposedly universal values of transparency and accessibility. This dialogue will examine such calls from the perspective of ethnographic research, where access to research data has historically been limited by design to protect communities, cultures, and individuals. What risks and rewards might openness carry in this context, and how might it reproduce existing forms of power and privilege? Join Marcel LaFlamme (@MarcelLaFlamme_), Open Research Manager at the scientific publisher PLOS, and Sebastian Braun, Director of American Indian Studies at Iowa State University, for a presentation and discussion about openness in ethnographic research in this month’s Open Scholar Café.

Opening Access to AAA’s Publishing Future | Society for Cultural Anthropology

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“The American Anthropological Association (AAA) publishing contract with Wiley comes to term in 2022. In light of this pressing deadline, several journal editors and section presidents have been meeting to uncover the common ground in our commitments and to determine what collective action might keep AAA’s expression of values front and center in our publishing practices and decisions.

We share AAA’s commitment to five “bedrock values” for our publishing program: quality, breadth, sustainability, access, and equity. Open access (OA) can be compatible with all five values, and should be a strategy that AAA considers deliberatively. We also advocate that in this moment of transition, AAA takes stock of ways in which all our interactions around publishing can become more democratic. We want more transparency around the publishing contracts and valuations that govern sections’ relative capacities. We want more input from editors as a collective in publishing decisions. And we want equitable labor practices that benefit our community.

We know from the 2020 AAA Editors Survey that there’s wide interest in and strong support for OA across AAA sections and journals. In June 2021, we carried out our own survey of twenty-seven journal editors and publishing section leaders, representing at least twenty-two AAA sections. We found that respondents had disparate understandings of what OA is and what it means for authors and journals. Nonetheless, 9 out of 24 respondents (37.5 percent) indicated that “if the AAA decides to renew its (previously 5-year) contract with Wiley and postpones discussion of Open Access publishing,” then “Yes,” their journal would “be interested in pursuing alternative means of going OA in the next year or so,” with another 13 (54 percent) indicating openness to the possibility (“Maybe”). Only 2 said “No.” We recognize that the questions OA raises about funding and revenue are significant. We further believe that once one learns more about the current academic publishing and OA landscape, these concerns are no longer as daunting….”

Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, the flagship journal of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, will transition to Open Access starting in 2022

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“Starting with Volume 30, Berghahn Journals will be the new publisher of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, the journal of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. The journal will be leaving Wiley to embark on becoming a fully open access journal as a part of the Berghahn Open Anthro – Subscribe to Open (S2O) initiative, which will enter its third year in 2022….”

How 3-D Scanning Is Reinventing Paleoanthropology – Scientific American

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“My principal job on site is to reconstruct fossils, and so I was tasked with putting together the DNH 155 skull. It took around a week to fully remove the skull fragments and all the sediment gluing the pieces together from their original resting place within the Drimolen Main Quarry. As each of the roughly 300 fragments were painstakingly removed, they were digitized with an Artec Space Spider, a professional handheld 3-D scanner. The scanner shoots patterns of light that distort based on the geography of the object it is hitting and bounce back to the scanner—like a bat using sonar, but in this case, light rather than sound is what’s bouncing back and forth. This technology was used to create high-resolution digital records of each piece of the cranium’s location within the sediment in case any pieces unexpectedly dislodged….

The first phase of reconstruction was completed by manually putting the pieces together. But, even after manual reconstruction, there were some elements of the cranium that couldn’t be placed because the contact point was too small, or a tiny part of the edges had been lost. In these cases, the Artec software was used to digitally situate the parts in relation to one another. Specifically, the face of DNH 155 cannot safely be attached to the rest of the cranium. This fusion was achieved digitally. Although it could have been glued, joining the pieces in this fashion would have been risky and would likely have caused permanent damage to the fossil. The published reconstruction of the DNH 155 cranium would not have been possible without 3-D technology, which would have been a huge blow to the ability of other researchers to assess the fossil in the future….

Reconstruction was only one part of the research program designed to reveal the secrets of this rare skull. Many of the researchers who work on fossils from South Africa are unable to travel to Johannesburg to work on the originals. This is especially true for researchers who are not based at wealthy institutions, and for cash-strapped students in general. It is for this reason that the Drimolen team have invested significant capital to digitize the DNH 155 cranium and most of the Drimolen fossil assemblage. As a Ph.D. student myself, I am particularly interested in the potential for high quality 3-D scanners such as the Space Spider to democratize research by allowing free and easy access to research-quality data. While permissions and access to such data are controlled by the University of the Witswatersrand (in the case of the Drimolen fossils) it is our ultimate intention to share our data with researchers, particularly early-career researchers, who are pursuing a topic related to the South African hominin fossils…..”

Jisc and Berghahn Journals offer UK universities a “Berghahn Open Anthro UK Flexible Journals Package”

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“Jisc and Berghahn Journals have entered into an agreement to offer UK libraries a bespoke subscriptions package as part of the Berghahn Open Anthro – Subscribe to Open (S2O) initiative. Launched in 2020, the initiative has been successfully adopted by the library community and partner organisations, Libraria and Knowledge Unlatched. S2O is a sustainable and equitable open access model that is gaining steam as the benefits to all participants in the publishing ecosystem is ever more apparent. Berghahn Open Anthro now enters its second year of providing full open access to all thirteen journals in the collection….”

Subscribe to Open: A Mutual Assurance Approach to Open Access  – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“Annual Reviews announced today that the 2020 volume of the Annual Review of Cancer Biology has been published open access and that the back volumes of this journal are also now available for free reading. As the pioneer of the Subscribe to Open model, congratulations are due on achieving their first open title. The 2020 articles are published copyright to Annual Reviews with a CC-BY license. The backfiles do not carry a CC license. Annual Reviews developed their Subscribe to Open model in partnership with Raym Crow, Managing Partner, Chain Bridge Group, with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. As interest in Subscribe to Open grows based on the experiences of early innovations, publishers and libraries need to develop an understanding of the various approaches to Subscribe to Open and the benefits and limitations of the model….

Subscribe to Open is an example of an assurance approach to addressing a collective action challenge. In the Subscribe to Open model developed by Annual Reviews, each subscribing library is motivated to continue to subscribe (because they have been a subscriber and as such have already made a decision that the content is worth paying for) by a discount that is built into the Subscribe to Open offer. The model is two-fold. First, if all libraries continue to subscribe, then not only will those libraries have access to the content for their users, but Annual Reviews will also make the content openly available to non-subscribers as well and apply a CC-BY license to the articles. Second, if all libraries do not continue to subscribe, then those that do will still receive the discount — as well as access to the content — but the content will not be made available to non-subscribers. In either scenario, the subscribing libraries receive a discount and access to the content. Essentially, this is a no-risk opt-in for the subscribing institution. Martin Paul Eve has outlined a similar possible model for society publishers but with a three year rather than annual timeframe. …”