The AAA/Wiley is already a Green OA Publisher

What green open access means and how it is supposed to work will be the focus of my remarks at the AAA event that Tom Boellstorff mentioned here and in his comment at Savage Minds. As the conversation continues there and elsewhere, I just want to stress one point tonight. Unlike my previous post, this one is very much about open access. It is completely understandable that many people (including some who speak officially about these things on behalf of AAA) have the perception that the AAA is not an open access publisher, but it is. Unless something has changed that I am unaware of, the AAA author agreement is fully compatible with green OA. Separate from my concerns about corporate enclosure and media consolidation in the anthropological journal ecology (see my previous post), if a person is publishing in a AAA journal (or in most, if not all, other Wiley journals), then there is nothing standing in the way of making this work available according to the norms of green OA. (That some AAA/Wiley authors are circulating their AAA/Wiley published work in ways that deviate from the norms of green OA and from their signed author agreements is a story for another day.)

In the early AnthroSource era, AAA members involved at the time worked hard to make the AAA a green OA publisher and they succeeded remarkably. (Putting this work to use has been a tremendous un-success for which the membership is largely responsible.) If you care about publishing in AAA journals and you care about OA, then it is worth taking the time to learn what all of this actually entails. One can start by looking at the American Anthropological Association database entry at SHERPA/RoMEO, where the relevant terms of art are also defined in accessible language (ex: “green,” “pre-print” etc.). The new and improved SHERPA/RoMEO database even provides access to the AAA/Wiley author agreement, which potential authors can study!

Separate from my feelings about corporate scholarly publishing, particularly about society-corporate co-publishing, it is fair to note what Stevan Harnad recently observed.

it’s also important to name and laud those publishers that have endorsed immediate, un-embargoed green open-access self-archiving. On the side of the angels in this respect are most of the major commercial publishers: Elsevier, Springer and, yes, Wiley.

At AAA I will report on my findings regarding the deep confusion about green OA among anthropologists. For everyone wondering and asking what can be done, I’ll just note that there are amazing resources available by which one can begin to gain control of the facts of the matter. An excellent gateway is Peter Suber’s Open Access Overview, which provides links to many of the most crucial additional resources in English.