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Open access rising

26 March, 2013

Is it just me or is the push towards an open access mentality in academia gathering steam? Recently, we’ve had the encouraging news that the Australian Research Council has introduced an open access policy for research it funds and the Obama administration has backed open access for federally-funded research.

It also seems that academics are becoming increasingly unwilling to participate as free labour in a system that generates extremely high profits for the big academic publishers. Most recently, the entire editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration quit in protest over the licensing agreement imposed by the publisher, Taylor & Francis. According to the agreement, authors had the choice to either wait up to 18 months to put their work in an open repository or pay a $3,000 fee to “unlock” their work.

In the field of anthropology the journal Cultural Anthropology has announced that it’s going full open access by 2014, the OA journal HAU appears to be going from strength to strength and there are a range of new journals seeking to make anthropological research public. One example is Global Ethnographic, a new OA journal that seeks to convey anthropological perspectives to as wide a public as possible. In contrast to most journals they seek contributions of no more than 3,000 words, preferring even shorter ones. They would appear to be trying to fill a niche between a more traditional peer-reviewed journal and an anthropological blog, encouraging more digestible chunks of writing with more popular appeal. I was also very happy to see that one of the first contributors was Macquarie’s own Paul Mason, with a piece on Intracultural and Intercultural Dynamics of Capoeira (PDF).

Along the same lines, but even closer to the popular end of the spectrum is the resolutely upbeat Popanth (Hot Buttered Humanity). Publishing articles in the 800-100 word range, they are aiming to provide bite-sized, and easily digestible, chunks of anthropological goodness.

On the whole I think this is all very encouraging, and it also shows the great diversity of attempts to openly communicate non-monetised anthropological knowledge, from traditional journal formats through to publications that are experimenting with niches somewhere between the established journals and the anthro blogosphere. It goes to show that we shouldn’t generalise too much about such things as the relationship between quality and open access. There are just too many different models being tried out right now. But I think we can generalise about a broader cultural shift in which we are seeing the reinvigoration of the idea that scholarship is a public good and should therefore be “out there” in whatever form that might take.

 

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2 Comments leave one →
  1. 27 March, 2013 5:18 am

    My university, the Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands, also has an official policy of encouraging open access. This may in fact be a more general Dutch Science Organisation (NWO) policy.

  2. Jovan Maud permalink*
    1 April, 2013 9:31 pm

    I should check and see whether the DFG in Germany also has an OA policy. I have a friend who is a librarian at Max Planck and something of an OA maven. I’ll see if she can enlighten me on this.

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