Shreds and Patches » Editorial and Opinion

How the Society for Cultural Anthropology is Speaking Out About the Research Works Act #RWA

Jason Baird Jackson — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 03:58:59 +0000

In a recent post, I posed the question that many scholars are asking of the scholarly societies to which they belong and of the publishers with whom they work. The question concerns the stance taken by such societies and publishers with respect to the Research Works Act (H.R. 3699). The American Association of Publishers supports this proposed U.S. law, which would roll back open access policies at the National Institutes of Health and block other federal agencies of establishing public access requirements for funded research. (Many good online sources exist for learning more about this bill.) The bill is opposed by the library community, open access advocates, public interest groups, many scholars, and some not-for-profit publishers.

In my post I asked where the American Anthropological Association stood on the Research Works Act. Today we learned from Mike Fortun that the board of one AAA section, the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA), has come out against H.R. 3699 and has urged the AAA as a whole to follow its lead. I am very thankful for the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s leadership on these issues, including its call for a AAA statement of position.

See the SCA statement here: http://savageminds.org/2012/01/17/the-question-is-not-does-but-can/#comment-715385

Filed under: American Anthropological Association, Editorial and Opinion, Enclosure, Law, OA Journals, open access, open anthropology

The American Folklore Society Expresses Support for Public Access to Federally Funded Peer-Reviewed Research #RWA @whitehouseostp

Jason Baird Jackson — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 03:23:32 +0000

Bad news abounds, but from the good news file comes today’s release of a letter sent by the President of the American Folklore Society, Diane Goldstein, on behalf of the society. (Diane is also my colleague here at Indiana University). The letter was a response to the recent Request for Information issued by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (part of the executive branch of the U.S. government charged with advising the president). The RFI focused on “Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting From Federally Funded Research.”

In the American Folklore Society’s response to the RFI, the society did two things of note. The AFS pointed to, and endorsed the careful and valuable submission that had already been made by the Association for Computers and the Humanities. In addition to supporting public access policies, the ACH statement (and by extension the AFS view) stresses the need for research policy makers working on this (and neighboring issues) to keep humanities research in mind as part of the larger (and relevant) research landscape.

The other theme brought out in the AFS statement is that the society has committed itself to sustainably pursuing public access goals as exemplified by its adoption of an author agreement for the Journal of American Folklore that is consistent with green open access practices (including repository deposit of the publisher’s final version) as well as its work (with the IU Libraries) on the Open Folklore project.

On a day in which SOPA and PIPA were prominent points of discussion, in a moment in which there are powerful interests also pushing the terrible Research Works Act, and on the day that the Supreme Court handed down a decision that signs off on a law that allows works to be taken out of the public domain and moved back into copyrighted status, I am proud to be a member of the AFS Executive Board working with colleagues who share a commitment finding pathways forward toward the full realization of open access scholarly communication in the public interest. Thank you to the Association for Computers and the Humanities for its leadership and for drafting an excellent position statement. Thank you to the White House for soliciting input on this vital public issue.

When the Association for Computers and the Humanities website comes out from under today’s SOPA blackout status, readers should be able to consult the ACH response to the RFI there. If you are in a hurry, the AFS website presents it alongside the AFS letter as a downloadable PDF. See here: http://www.afsnet.org/news/81409/AFS-Advocates-for-the-Humanities-in-Federal-Research-Policy.htm

Filed under: American Folklore Society Business, Current Events, Editorial and Opinion, Enclosure, Folklore Studies, Good News, IP (Intellectual Property), OA Journals, open access, Scholarly Communication, Scholarly Societies

Three Cheers for the Librarians–Lets Help Them Help Us

Jason Baird Jackson — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:14:10 +0000

Three cheers for the librarians who look after us, whether we know it or not. As a student, teacher, researcher, and citizen I work with a wide range of information resources everyday. Whether I step into a library building or not, a large proportion of those resources are available to me because librarians work to make them available to me. Even when I use resources that come to me without the direct intervention of librarians and library staff, I am benefiting from the worlds of education, research, and democratic governance, including values of access and privacy, that librarians work hard to foster and defend everyday. I cannot say thank you enough for their work.

In his round up on “Anthropology and Open Access” (dealing with HR 3699 and SOPA), Jason Antrosio at Anthropology Report has kindly cited my comment on Ryan Anderson’s Savage Minds post on these themes. Under my own by-line, here is what I said in response to Ryan’s post. (Ryan is the Savage Mind who kindly interviewed me on OA issues in anthropology a while back.)

It is crucial that faculty and graduate students are part of the push back (against SOPA and HR 3699) for a number of reasons. One of which is that we need, in doing so, to give the librarians a morale boost. They have been fighting for us on this front for decades with too few of us knowing or caring about it. They have been getting tired, really tired. The way that, on this one, faculty and graduate students have been unusually vocal, has been encouraging to them. We need their help. Keep it up.

Thankfully tons of smart people have been explaining the problems with H.R. 3699 and SOPA. I could list links all day. If you do not yet know about these issues, dive in quickly and get them figured out.

Filed under: Academic LIfe, Editorial and Opinion, IP (Intellectual Property), IT (Information Technology), Law, Libraries, OA Journals, open access, Scholarly Communication

Behind the Research Works Act: Which U.S. Representatives are Receiving Cash from Reed Elsevier?

Jason Baird Jackson — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 01:47:33 +0000

A bill (H.R. 3699) recently introduced in the U.S. Congress by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) aims to undo open access policies at NIH and to prevent the establishment of open access policies in other federal agencies. The large publishers, as represented by The Association of American Publishers, has expressed its love for this innocuously named “Research Works Act.” Open access advocates understand it as another terrible assault on the public interest and as instrument designed to not only mislead those who do not understand how scholarly research and its communication work but to more intensively transfer public resources into private, corporate hands. I am not going to offer an analysis of the bill and its contexts here.

In this note, I just want to highlight University of California Biologist Michael Eisen’s posting about the Research Works Act. After contextualizing and characterizing H.R. 3699, he points his readers to political contribution data available via MapLight. Looking into which members of Congress have received contributions from the large, multinational scholarly publisher Read Elsevier, Eisen notes that the largest recipient of Elsevier cash is Rep. Maloney (co-sponsor of H.R. 3699). He notes:

Dutch publisher Elsevier and its senior executives made 31 contributions to members of the House in 2011, of which 12 went to Representative Maloney. This includes contributions from 11 senior executives or partners, only one of whom is a resident of her district.

Who else is on the Elsevier donation list? Any guesses? Yes, of course, Rep. Issa. (For the full list of Elsevier recipients, see here.)

Thank you to Professor Eisen for his work digging into this question.

Filed under: Academic LIfe, Databases, Editorial and Opinion, Enclosure, Environmental Degredation, For the Record, IP (Intellectual Property), Neoliberal Patterns, open access, Scholarly Communication

Association of American Publishers Issues Horrible New Press Release in Support of a Horrible Bill: Where Do You Stand?

Jason Baird Jackson — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 03:38:14 +0000

The Association of American Publishers has issued a awful new press release expressing enthusiasm for the Research Works Act, H.R. 3699 describing it as “significant legislation that will help reinforce America’s leadership in scholarly and scientific publishing in the public interest and in the critical peer-review system that safeguards the quality of such research.”

This is just the latest in an endless, dispiriting series of commercial publisher FUD campaigns and efforts at the further corporate enclosure of public resources. Advocates for the public interest in scholarship will resist H.R. 3699 and those with vested profits in the terrible status quo will support it. As with FRPAA, as always, a key question is where will the scholarly societies stand? Another is whether any more academic authors and editors will wake up and consider their role in the perpetuation of a system that is not only dysfunctional but also increasingly corrupt and immoral.

Money in politics? Corporate personhood? Policies that harm the poorest and help the most affluent? Academic authors–many of you are not connecting the dots that lead to your own practices.

Another question is where do those AAP members that are not-for-profit university presses (Chicago, California, Hawaii, North Carolina, Illinois (sigh), Texas, Tennessee) stand? Is the AAP speaking for you on this one? Don’t forget PRISM, y’all.

Filed under: Academic LIfe, Current Events, Editorial and Opinion, IP (Intellectual Property), Law, Neoliberal Patterns, open access, Property, Protests, Scholarly Communication, Scholarly Societies

MLA Parternering with CUNY in Important Scholarly Communications Initiative: Commons in a Box

Jason Baird Jackson — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:53:22 +0000

On the basis of my work on the Open Folklore project, I have spoken on a number of occasions in recent weeks about potential and power of scholarly societies partnering directly with universities in the development of tools, protocols, strategies, and projects in the scholarly communications domain. Along these lines, I am especially interested in the news that the Modern Language Association will be a partner in the Commons in a Box project announced by The City University of New York. This project brings together the open source tools already being used by CUNY Academic Commons and will make them available and easily installable at other institutions. For the MLA and its 30K+ members, these software tools will be the basis for MLA Commons. Read all about it in Audrey Watter’s story at Inside Higher Education. Congratulations CUNY! Congratulations MLA members!

For an account of my presentation to the Digital Anthropology panel at the recent AAA meetings, where I spoke about university library+scholarly society partnerships in light of the AFS+IU Libraries partnership on Open Folklore, see the detailed summary published by Daniel Lende at Neuroanthropology.

Filed under: Academic LIfe, Editorial and Opinion, Good News, Open Source, Scholarly Communication, Scholarly Societies

On Green OA and the Future of AAA Publishing at #AAA2011

Jason Baird Jackson — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 13:03:51 +0000

Yesterday I participated in the forum on the “Future of AAA Publishing” that was staged during the 2011 American Anthropological Association meetings. I joined this event because I was asked to do so by Michael F. Brown, a fine colleague who would is working hard to be helpful in the organization’s scholarly communications vision quest. My prepared remarks from the event are offered below CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0). Readers of my statement will see that I did not really address the future as much as try to engage the muddled present. I care very much about the future of scholarly communications and am very interested in all the excellent thought that colleagues beyond anthropology and folklore studies are giving to cutting edge discussions of it. The context and venue for my remarks, as well as the five minute time limit on panelist statements, shaped how I used my time. I was trying to serve an educational role. Each panelist had a different piece of the story to reflect upon (association finances, tenure and promotion, international issues, etc.), thus there was not space or audience readiness for more complex matters, such as curatorial models of journal editing, metadata protocols, the weakness of STEM-centered philanthropic efforts in Africa, open source platforms, patron driven acquisition, non-disclosure agreements vis-a-vis big bundle deals, etc. Things are what they are.

Green Open Access Practices

Jason Baird Jackson

I want to thank the organizers of today’s event for their invitation to participate in this discussion. I have had a lot to say elsewhere [ex: my interview with Ryan Anderson on OA and anthropology] about publishing practices in our field and my remarks will be focused on a single node in the larger network of issues. I agreed to take on the slice dealing with green open access practices because this is a realm in which the matters before us are largely no longer policy setting debates but are instead questions of education and implementation. It is in this more modest context that I hope to contribute some observations that may be useful.

Despite organizationally opposing so-called green open access mandates (ex: AAA 2006; Calpestri 2006; Davis 2010), the American Anthropological Association is already a green open access [-friendly] publisher (AAA 2006). I am very proud of the association’s leadership in this regard. We were ahead of the curve when, in 2005, the association adopted an author agreement that allowed association authors to circulate post-prints in conformity with standard green OA practices and in compliance with the mandates that govern the work of some of our colleagues (AAA 2006). In adopting a green author agreement, the AAA joined the approximately 63% of scholarly journals that similarly allow authors to circulate their work down the green open access path (RoMEO 2011). But what does this mean? How does one do it?

To frame green open access I need to introduce a few terms of art. I’ll begin with the text objects at issue. The target for green OA is the classic research article and for today my remarks are limited to that genre.

A pre-print is an article manuscript as created by an author prior to its revision on the basis of the formal peer-review that often accompanies submission to a journal. The never-submitted manuscripts sitting in our files are thus technically pre-prints, as are the conference papers that we informally and individually forward to our colleagues. Because we have never transferred our copyright in these manuscripts, they are usually ours to do with as we please. Should we submit our manuscripts to a journal, the policies of that journal may come into play and it is possible that we will be pressed to withdraw such pre-print manuscripts from circulation, but typically journal policies do not concern themselves with pre-prints. To flesh this out, let me note that a journal that only allows for the circulation of a pre-print is a yellow journal. A white journal makes no provision for OA of any kind.

The center of gravity for discussions of green open access is what is called a post-print. A post-print is a manuscript that has been revised by an author in the wake of peer-review and acceptance by a journal. We sometimes characterize such a manuscript as the last clean version prior to publication. When a journal’s author agreement is coded as “green” this means that the journal allows authors to circulate this version of their article outside the publication channel provided by the publisher itself. A key but confusing point arises here. A publisher’s author agreement may additionally allow authors the right to circulate their article in final published form outside the journal’s official publication channels. This kind of author’s right is rare. When it occurs, as in the author agreements used by the University of California Press’ for its own journals, the journal is still classified as a green one (UCP 2011). Green status goes to a journal that allows “at least” the post-print to be circulated. Because copyediting, typesetting, coding, and other digital production tasks represent value added by the publisher itself most are not interested in giving away these enhancements in a form that competes directly with the revenue-generating official version and that exceeds the requirements of the relevant funder and institutional mandates so prominent in discussions of green OA.

Mentioning mandates prompts me to evoke the crucial topic of funder, subject, and institutional repositories and their associated software platforms and protocols. To fully engage with green OA, one needs to know what repositories are and how they work. Maybe there will be time to really consider repositories during our discussions.

I have raised these basic aspects of green OA because I want to highlight what I see as two problems in the current lived practices of anthropologists.

The first concerns inadvertent piracy. In posting publisher’s versions online without securing additional permissions to do so, a growing number of our colleagues are out of compliance with their author agreements and are exposing themselves and, in many cases, their home institutions, to legal action for copyright infringement. I know that the AAA is not prosecuting such cases and is unlikely to do so, but I am in favor of all of us understanding how the green OA system works and what we should and should not be doing with our publications online. I advocate formal educational outreach on these issues as well as living within the current intellectual property system that we have established for ourselves. If it is not adequate to our needs, then we need to change it rather than ignore it as accidental pirates or contest it as self-conscious ones. I recognize that these issues are really confusing and that it takes time for all of us to gain control of them. The shockingly high number of members of the AAA leadership who appear to be engaged in accidental piracy, despite their intense participation in complex publishing discussions, speaks to the difficulties that we have all faced in making sense of the changing publishing and intellectual property system.

In a few sentences, please let me point to my second concern, which is related. The way that many anthropologists are pursuing green OA is sub-optimal not only on the legal front, but also in other vital ways. Institutional repositories, which are the core focus of legitimate green OA efforts not only bar authors from inadvertent piracy, they also provide the best home for our post-prints from the perspective of wide access, discoverability, technical interoperability, and long-term preservation. I do not have time to explain these assertions, but departmental and personal websites are terrible in comparison to professionally managed repositories. The only advantage that they possess in our current context is that, unlike legally compliant repositories, such websites are easy venues at which to engage in accidental and purposeful piracy and from which to take down our content should we be confronted with cease and desist letters or more serious legal action.

Except for the fact that institutional repositories are not yet available to all anthropologists, all of the other resources that we need to pursue green OA in a legal, sustainable, and helpful way are available to us. Educating ourselves as to how this can best be done is all that is required for us to actualize the green OA options that we have already created for ourselves as a society. In doing so, we advance both the communitarian and the selfish goals motivating the broader open access movement.

Coda: In is absolutely essential to know that green OA and so-called gold OA are very different things. As the editor of a six year-old gold OA journal, I would be happy to discuss this other path to achieving open access goals during our discussion.

References Cited

American Anthropological Association (AAA)

2006 AAA and the Federal Research Public Access Act (S.2695). http://web.archive.org/web/20080127202801/http://www.aaanet.org/press/FRPAA.htm, accessed November 17, 2011.

Calpestri, Suzanne

2006 AAA AnthroSource Steering Committee Supports FRPAA. http://www.aaanet.org/issues/policy-advocacy/advocacy/AAA-AnthroSource-Steering-Committee-Supports-FRPAA.cfm?renderforprint=1, accessed November 17, 2011.

Davis, William E.

2010 [Letter on behalf of the AAA to Representatives Darrell Issa and Carolyn Maloney regarding the formulation of public access policies for federal agencies] July 9, 2010. http://www.aaanet.org/issues/policy-advocacy/AAA-Responds-to-Congressional-Letter-on-Public-Access-Policies.cfm, accessed November 17, 2011

RoMEO

2011 [Statistics on the percentage of RoMEO tracked journals that have full green author agreements.] http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php, accessed November 17, 2011.

University of California Press (UCP)

2011 Information for Authors. http://ucpressjournals.com/authorInfo.asp, accessed November 17, 2011.

Filed under: American Anthropological Association, Anthropology, Editorial and Opinion, Law, OA Journals, open anthropology, Scholarly Communication, Scholarly Societies, Speaking

Open Access Interview Part Two @savageminds

Jason Baird Jackson — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:10:04 +0000

Thanks again to Ryan Anderson for working with me on an interview exploring the basic issues relating to open access in anthropology and folklore. The second part of three has now been published on Savage Minds. As always I appreciate Savage Minds for hosting such considerations of these issues.

Filed under: Academic LIfe, American Anthropological Association, American Folklore Society Business, Digital Projects, Editorial and Opinion, Folklore Studies, IP (Intellectual Property), IT (Information Technology), OA Books, OA Journals, OA Media, open access, open anthropology, Open Education, open folklore, Scholarly Communication

Interview on Open Access @savageminds

Jason Baird Jackson — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 15:59:29 +0000

Thank you very much to anthropologist Ryan Anderson for inviting me to do an interview on open access issues in anthropology. He has begun publishing it on Savage Minds and re-broadcasting it on his weblog ethnografix. Ryan is also one of the organizers of the online anthropology magazine anthropologies. The current issue focuses on Appalachia and includes essays by Britteny M. Howell, Ann Kingsolver, Tammy L. Clemons, Shaunna L. Scott, Amanda Fickey and Lynne Rieske-Kinney, and Sarah Raskin. Check it out.

Follow Ryan on Twitter at @ethnografix

Filed under: Anthropology, Digital Projects, Editorial and Opinion, Folklore Studies, Interlocutors, OA Books, OA Journals, OA Media, open access, open anthropology, open folklore, Scholarly Communication

Genres Leak, Being a Reflection on Michael E. Smith’s Essay on Semi-, Quasi- and Psuedo- Journals

Jason Baird Jackson — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 02:04:26 +0000

On his weblog Publishing Archaeology, Michael E. Smith raises key questions about the status of a mode of scholarly communication for which he is in search of a name. To guide his thinking, he considers two actual web publishing projects in anthropology: (1) Anthropologies and (2) Anthropology of This Century. Committed to the centrality of the established peer-reviewed journal form (but eager to advance open access and also a blogger himself) he wonders what to call these journal-like publishing efforts. Noting that these publishing efforts have some clear similarities to conventional journal but that they are also, in some ways, different, the possibilities that occur to him include semi-, quasi-, and pseudo- journal.

I do not have answers for Michael’s questions all nailed down perfectly myself, but I doubt that semi-journal or quasi-journal or pseudo-journal will, in practice, stick. There are a great many experiments going on in scholarly communication and I think that we will eventually discover the right names for specific kinds of projects. I think that the label “journal” is likely going to continue to spread to refer to a greater diversity of communicative forms. For me, the key thing that we know now is that it is important not to conflate platforms with genres (or with quality).

At issue in Michael’s thought-piece is the blog-like quality of some of the projects that he has in mind. Sometimes this blog-like quality is a direct artifact of the fact that the project is being presented to the world on blogging software. I have some experience with the question and would like to unpack it.

Lets take Anthropologies as the starting example. Ryan Anderson is one of the anthropologists behind Anthropologies. I know from separate correspondence that Ryan and I have been having that he himself is uncertain about the “Journal or Not a Journal?” question. In this context, hopefully my remarks may be useful to Ryan and the Anthropologies team. Anthropologies uses Blogger. Does that make it a weblog? I do not think so.

Michael evokes some of the key hallmarks of the classic journal. Peer-review is crucial for him. An editorial board, a regular publication schedule, articles by scholars, submission guidelines, numbered volumes and issues are other key indexes of a full scholarly journal.

In a thought experiment, American Antiquity could tomorrow begin publication on the Blogger or WordPress software platforms. If all other aspects of its publishing work remained the same, it would be just as much a significant journal tomorrow as it is today. While this is a made up example, I am the faculty liaison for Folklore Forum. Folklore Forum is a student-run journal (like most law journals are) published by the graduate students in my department. Unlike the many start up journals popping up these days, Folklore Forum is ancient as these things go. It began in 1968 and for most of its history, it was published in beautifully bound and typeset print issues. Libraries and scholars from around the world subscribed to it. It is one of a number of relatively famous journals of a similar sort. Some have been longer lived than others, but it belongs in a group that would include Kroeber Anthropological Society Journal (at Berkeley) and other well-established student run journals in the human sciences. The important thing for this discussion is that Folklore Forum is a peer-reviewed journal with numbered volumes and issues, an editorial team, a business model, a preservation plan, and all the rest.

Several years ago Folklore Forum made some smart moves. The team worked with the librarians at Indiana University to move its large and rich back file into the IUScholarWorks Repository. This made them available digitally in an open access way. It also provided a high level of assurance re. digital preservation and it made this content harvestable by search tools like Google Scholar and the Open Folklore project. (Harvesting is facilitated by the use of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, a hallmark of software tools like DSpace and OJS.) So, all the back content is available free and robustly in a library-based repository. What about new content going forward? For this, Folklore Forum went out of the paper printing and subscription management business. This was an excellent thing, because the financial and logistics side of the work was a drag on the work of the graduate students publishing the journal. While learning business skills is not itself a bad thing, its not an ideal hobby to pursue in thick of graduate school. Giving up the fulfillment work meant that more time could be devoted to intellectual side of the journal (and to studying for qualifying exams, etc.), which is the key part from a student point of view. In place of bound paper, the students moved journal production to WordPress.com, the free blogging platform. If you consult the journal today, you will find the recent issues in their WordPress-based form.

As current issues become back issues, they can be moved into the institutional repository-based collection for preservation and all the other good things that repositories bring. For the current issues, WordPress has tons of advantages that recommend it as a journal platform. Great user statistics is one of these. Easy markup and formatting, along with easy linking, commenting, and tagging are others. Easy inclusion of images, sound files, video and other media are some additional advantages. Low (nearly $0) cost is another good reason to use WordPress for the journal.

In the context of Michael’s query, if Folklore Forum was a peer-reviewed (student) journal when it published two thick print issues a year, it should still be a journal now, despite the fact that blogging software is part of its publishing ecology.

Folklore Forum‘s editors were aware of the possibility of the path that they actually took because I had already been there ahead of them. When I was the editor of Museum Anthropology, I was directed by the leadership of the Council for Museum Anthropology to develop contingency plans in the event that it came to pass that Museum Anthropology as we had known it could not continue publication. This directive was the catalyst for the journal that became Museum Anthropology Review. The Wiley-Blackwell deal ushered in the current period of relative stability for AAA journals and Museum Anthropology is now doing well as a AAA section journal but, with the consent of the CMA board, I have continued to edit Museum Anthropology Review. MAR is today published using Open Journal Systems, an amazingly robust and sophisticated open source software package for the publishing of scholarly journals. But when it began, MAR was launched using WordPress. I learned a tremendous amount and got the journal going using the same scheme that Folklore Forum continues to use. While much was gained in the move to OJS (our OJS instance is managed by the IU Libraries as part of the IUScholarWorks Journals program), there were losses too. There are things that are easy to do in WordPress that are hard to do in OJS. WordPress is an amazing piece of software. (I use it for the website on which I am writing right now.) [The current form that MAR takes can be found here. The old WordPress site still exists and can be looked at here.]

Like spray paint, tools can be made with one purpose in mind and then get re-purposed for other ends. WordPress was built for blogging, but it is used by some people as a straight content management system to make blog-free websites. It can also be used as an excellent journal publishing platform (especially if one knows how to make it play well with the broader open access journal ecology). With sophisticated plug-ins, WordPress is being used to publish innovative books and lots of other kinds of stuff.

Similarly, Open Journal Systems was built to publish open access scholarly journals, but it is now being used as an editorial back end for toll access journals that are not even published on it. (Kim and Mike Fortun used it as the editorial workflow system for Cultural Anthropology.) It can also be used to publish monographs. The software has been repurposed as the basis for Open Conference Systems, a conference management and proceedings publishing platform. OJS is even being used to publish toll access journals! (The software can be configured for this purpose, despite this being counter to the whole point for which the software was developed. This is how Ethnology, a key journal for sure, is published using OJS.)

For me, the take away of these examples is that it is important not to let platforms determine or color our understandings of genre. There are editorially reviewed journals and they constitute a different kind of journal from peer-reviewed journals. Alongside Museum Anthropology Review in the IUScholarWorks Journals program is Anthropology of East Europe Review. AEER is in its 29th volume and it moved from print publication to open access publication using OJS. It is a great journal edited by my great colleague Sarah Phillips. It has a strong group (the East European Anthropology Group and SOYUZ (the Research Network for Postsocialist Cultural Studies) behind it and a rich tradition. But it is not a peer-reviewed journal, its an editorially reviewed one. That’s its tradition and it is not unique in this status. Its a different animal from American Antiquity, but we still call it a journal. MAR is newer and peer-reviewed, AEER is older but not peer-reviewed. They both basically look and work the same because they use the same platform.

Is Anthropologies a journal? I do not get to decide for anyone but myself, but I would say that it is quickly moving in that direction. It could have a full editorial board next year. It already has a production schedule that it seems to be living up to. It has scholarly authors and scholarly readers. With less than a day’s work, it could have a fully developed set of submissions guidelines. If its editors wished, it could switch to peer-reviewed publication but we do not require this of other things we call journals. (Hence we say “peer-reviewed journal” when we need to be clear.)

There is a much more adventuresome conversation happening elsewhere. I’ll reflect on these more radical re-imaginings of the journal form, and of peer-review, on another occasion. (An example.) Relative to these broader discussions, the question of the name we attach to project such as Anthropologies and Anthropology of This Century is a relatively modest matter.

Edward Sapir remarked that “all grammars leak.” Inspired by Sapir on this point, folklorists love to say that genres leak also. Empirical work on genre systems worldwide confirm this. People are always messing around with the canonical genres that they inherit. While we often seek to protect and purify them, we just as often mix them, twist them, and hammer them into new shapes. The scholarly journal and journal article, like the scholarly book, the scholarly blog, the scholarly film, the scholarly website, the scholarly database, the scholarly poster, the scholarly pamphlet, and all the other modes of scholarly communication available to us are in the midst of a period of wild experimentation and ferment. This is one of my favorite aspects of doing the work that I do in the moment that I am doing it.

I do have a concern though. Projects/journals like Anthropologies and Anthropology of This Century need to develop sound plans for preservation. This is not impossible, but if they are going to help shape and circulate the scholarly record, they also need to figure out how the works that they publish are going to be around for the very long haul. This can be done, but it takes research, thought, and effort. As always, librarians are great partners in this work. In the meantime, authors who publish in such venues have the ability to self-archive their contributions in places like institutional repositories, thereby insuring that their contributions will stay available, even if the venue in which it was initially published is dismantled or abandoned.

Filed under: Anthropology, DIY, Editorial and Opinion, Folklore Studies, OA Journals, OA Media, open access, open anthropology, open folklore, Open Source, Practical Information, Scholarly Communication, social media, Software