Tag: gold open access

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Cultural Anthropology, Be My Valentine!

The peer-reviewed journal Cultural Anthropology has gone open access!  When the Directory of Open Access Journals boasts almost 10,000 gold open access journals, why is this big news?  For several reasons:

  • Now that the open access movement is gaining momentum, many journals begin as gold open access journals.  Cultural Anthropology, on the other hand, began as a subscription-based journal…way back in 1986.  It was a well-established and well-respected journal, chugging along just fine, but its editors decided that subscriptions and restrictions were no longer the right model.  So they thoughtfully and carefully transitioned to gold open access.
  • Cultural Anthropology is (to the best of my knowledge) the first really major, established open access anthropology journal in the United States.  The first biggie in any field is big news!
  • Cultural Anthropology is published by the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA), a section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), which has been slow to support open access. Organizational movement toward open access in AAA is evidence (among many other pieces of evidence) that open access is no longer a fringe movement.  If it’s in the air at AAA, it’s in the air everywhere.
  • Wait, let’s step back a bit more: Cultural Anthropology is published by a scholarly society! That’s a big deal! As far as I know, no academics are worried about the fate or profits of the big commercial publishers, but many are worried about the financial health of scholarly societies, which often rely on subscription income to support other areas of operation. If SCA and AAA are confident that making Cultural Anthropology open access won’t be ruinous, maybe other associations will begin to think more seriously about embracing openness?  Maybe more scholarly societies will consider Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s statement that a society’s value “may be moving from providing closed access to certain research products to instead facilitating the broadest possible distribution of the work done by its members.”

For all these reasons, I want Cultural Anthropology to be my valentine!

Photo is © Dave, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license.
Photo is © Dave, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license.
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Predatory Open Access Publishers

The 2013 list of predatory open access publishers and journals has been released. This year’s list includes over 200 predatory open access publishing operations and over 100 predatory standalone journals.  Last year’s list named only 23 predatory publishers — clearly, there are more and more people out there who don’t really care about high-quality research and just see dollar signs when they learn about the gold open access publishing model. Unfortunately, these shady journals put the reputation of open access more generally at risk.

What, more specifically, are predatory open access publishers?

They are OA publishers whose mission is profit, not dissemination of scholarly information.  It’s not that they publish peer-reviewed scholarship and happen to have fees to cover expenses (a common and perfectly respectable open access model) — no, it’s that they charge fees to make a profit and happen to publish some articles, many of questionable quality, often without any peer review. One of their hallmarks is spamming people with calls for papers and flattering invitations to write or serve as editors — I’ve received many emails like this, and you probably have too.

Don’t fall prey to predatory open access publishers! (And don’t forget that there are predatory and low-quality toll access journals as well!)  Always research a journal’s quality before submitting an article to it!

(For more information, see “‘Predatory’ Open-Access Scholarly Publishers” by predatory-publisher watchdog (and keeper of the list) Jeffrey Beall.)