Tag: 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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Open Argentina

Here in the United States, open access advocates are struggling mightily to make the case that taxpayers are entitled to the research their taxes fund — and that open access is good for innovation, industry (well, except possibly the high-profit publishing industry…), and the world of ideas.  Basically, it’s a deathmatch between the public and publishers, which have so far succeeded in sowing enough confusion to kill FRPAA in Congress and Senate and TAPFR in New York State.

(But all is not lost. FRPAA’s been revived as FASTR; there’s hope for TAPFR moving forward; and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a memorandum instructing all federal agencies with research and development expenditures over $100 million to develop plans to make the results of federally-funded research freely available within 12 months of publication.)

Meanwhile, progress is swifter and less controversial elsewhere. For example, on Wednesday Argentina’s Senate unanimously passed a law that requires all publicly-funded research to be made open access within six months of publication.  My Spanish isn’t so hot, but this is a very exciting paragraph indeed (key phrases bolded):

Los investigadores, tecnólogos, docentes, becarios de posdoctorado y estudiantes de maestría y doctorado cuya actividad de investigación sea financiada con fondos públicos, deberán depositar o autorizar expresamente el depósito de una copia de la versión final de su producción científico-tecnológica publicada o aceptada para publicación y/o que haya atravesado un proceso de aprobación por una autoridad competente o con jurisdicción en la materia, en los repositorios digitales de acceso abierto de sus instituciones, en un plazo no mayor a los seis (6) meses desde la fecha de su publicación oficial o de su aprobación.

May we follow suit.

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To Catch a Predator: How to Recognize Predatory Journals and Conferences

You are invited to the second event in the Information Interventions @ CUNY series:

To Catch a Predator: How to Recognize Predatory Journals and Conferences
Friday, November 15, 2013, 10am – noon
The Graduate Center, Rooms C203/C204 (Concourse Level)
Refreshments will be served

Evaluating journal quality is increasingly difficult: there are many new journals and publishers. Some are predatory, claiming peer review where there is none and being far more interested in profit than the dissemination of high-quality scholarly information. (Many others are simply low quality — not predatory but not a desirable publishing venue for most scholars.) Predatory publishers have always existed but, due in part to the growth of online publishing, they are becoming more visible, more aggressive, and more important to understand.

Come learn about their spammy, scammy practices, as well as how to distinguish simply less-good publishers from truly predatory ones, why the existence of predatory publishers should not scare us away from open access publishing more generally, and how to respond when others conflate predatory and open access publishing.

RSVP by Thursday, November 7 to Jill Cirasella or Maura Smale.

Sponsored by the LACUNY Scholarly Communications Roundtable, the CUNY Office of Library Services, and Just Publics @ 365.

There are more Information Interventions @ CUNY coming up: Stay tuned for Spring 2014 events about open educational resources and the controversy surrounding dissertations and open access!

Image Source: Simon Fraser University Library, http://http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/26696/Shark2.jpg