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Posts from the ‘OA Journals’ Category

Dec 28

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Big OA Journal Project Underway in India

An ambitious gold open access journal publishing effort for folkloristics and neighboring fields (ethnomusicology, tribal studies, regional studies, and performance studies) is underway in India. The National Folklore Support Centre is using Open Journal Systems to host fourteen journals, both new and established. Some have been publishing for some time, others have launched with inaugural issues, others are announced but still in the works. The journal editorial offices seem to span India, with a diversity of editorial teams and research concerns.  See what the effort looks like at the NFSC portal, here. Congratulations to all involved.

Nov 27

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Questions for Anthropology Now

I originally wrote the following as a comment to a post on the blog Savage Minds. Find it in context here.

On the launch of Anthropology Now. I have been contemplating a blog post motivated not only by the launch of Anthropology Now at the AAAs, but by the remarkably high number of new journals generally and especially the number launched at the AAAs this year. For now, this comment will probably have to suffice.

I like magazines. I like anthropology. Inspired by similar publications in neighboring fields, I have long wished for an anthropology magazine that was both serious and Border’s magazine rack friendly. I have not had the luxury of speaking to any of the excellent people who are throwing their weight behind Anthropology Now, but I would like to ask them to explain publicly their business model in a way that is both clear and that allows the community to compute the costs and benefits of their approach. On the surface of things, I am disappointed that such excellent people are working so hard on a project that seems both late 20th century in approach and potentially harmful to the ecology of scholarly communication in anthropology.

They would like me to pay $55 a year to subscribe as an individual. This is a bit steep for me, but it is within the realm of the possible. On the other hand, they would like me (as would all of the non-OA journal publishers) to go pester my university librarian to subscribe. The rates for this range from $341 per year for online only to $394 per year for print and online combined.  This institutional rate is, of course, modest when compared to the costs of big science journals, but it still arrives in a time in which excellent R1 universities find themselves canceling a significant number of anthropology journal subscriptions each year. Who is taking this toll and what value added benefits will my library be getting when it invests this much money and, along the way, subsidizes either my below-cost subscription or provides the profit margin for a for-profit publisher?

I have nothing against Paradigm Publishers per se. I am glad that they care enough about our field to publish books in it and to, now, engage with this journal/magazine effort. But why them? Were no university presses willing to undertake this effort? The Anthropology Now PR materials compare the new effort to “sociology’s Contexts“. If the goal is to be the anthropological equivalent to Contexts, wouldn’t it have been great to have worked with the University of California Press–Contexts‘ publisher. Or if that were too close to home, with a not-for-profit publisher with similar experience working on scholarly magazines? Maybe Paradigm Publishers will be able to offer something that other publishers will not (or would not) be able to offer, but before pressing our libraries to buy in, I would like to know a bit about what the upsides here are. On the library side, aren’t we just making a bad journal ecology worse? Read more

Nov 22

Cultural Analysis and the Savage Minds OA Awards

The winners of the Savage Minds OA Anthropology Awards have just been announced in the run up to tomorrow night’s award’s ceremony in the SF Hilton Lobby at 6 pm. Cultural Analysis, a fine OA folklore journal on whose editorial board I serve has taken the runner up spot in an excellent field. The journal Anthropology Matters has won the first place spot. Learn about all the nominees on Savage Minds here and who the winners in all three categories are here. Congratulations to the winners and thanks to those who voted.

Nov 15

Get out the Vote (for Open Access)

Spearheaded by Chris Kelty, the key anthropology weblog Savage Minds is organizing a grassroots awards effort for open access (and open access-spirited) publishing efforts in (and near) the field of anthropology. There are three categories–best OA journal, best weblog, and best digital media project. Several projects that I nominated, or that I am a big fan of, are on the short list and can now be considered in the voting that will determine who wins big during the upcoming AAA meetings. Everyone should vote for their own favorites, but I would like to highlight three folkloristics-meets-ethnology journals on the list:  Cultural Analysis (on whose editorial board I serve), Asian Ethnology and Oral Tradition. It is exciting that they are under consideration. In the digital project category is the Digital Ethnography project, which I really like, and the wonderful work of my friend Kim Christen and her collaborators: The Mukurtu Archive (An Indigenous Archive Tool). If you care about supporting open access and/or open source (and open minded) projects such as these, please visit Savage Minds (here) and cast your vote.

Nov 12

Catching up with FolkPub

The student editors and publishers in the Folklore and Ethnomusicology Publications Group (a.k.a. FolkPub) have been very busy in recent months. An enterprise of the graduate students in IU’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, FolkPub is the publisher of the venerable journal Folklore Forum and of books under the Trickster Press imprint. Much of their work has been migrating online in recent days and I wanted to note some highlights.

Current articles and reviews–in open full-text– in Folklore Forum are appearing at a new website: http://folkloreforum.net/ . The new site offers an RSS feed, so you can easily keep up with new content in a feed reader. Earlier this year, the new site and format debuted with an issue on folklore studies in East Asia in honor of Roger L. Janelli. In recent days, several new reviews have been added to the site and new contributions are expected on a continuing basis. Several special issues are in the works.

The entire back run of Folklore Forum back to its beginnings in 1968 have been made freely and fully available in the IUScholarWorks Repository service here at Indiana University. Find the whole collection, in searchable form here.

Work on the book side continues as well. At the recent American Folklore Society meetings, the FolkPub crew were an active presence, selling backlist titles and unveilling both a new title and a new business model. They were proud to release a a new, enhanced edition of Sandra Dolby’s classic work Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative. This title returns to print re-typeset with a new preface by the author and a foreward by Richard Bauman. Unlike past Trickster Press titles, this work has been published using a Print-on-Demand approach which means that it can be offerred at modest cost, that it should be available forever and that the students will not need to worry about managing complex shipping and storage problems. Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative is available directly from Amazon.com here. Also available in this new format is Trickster Press’ best-selling textbook The Emergence of Folklore in Everyday Life: A Fieldguide and Sourcebook, edited by George H. Schoemaker. It too is now available via Amazon.com. Find it here.

Information on the entire Trickster Press backlist can be found on the Press’ website at: https://www.indiana.edu/~folkpub/trickster/

One Trickster Press book title has already joined Folklore Forum as an open access resource in IUScholarWorks Repository. The book The Old Traditional Way of Life: Essays in Honor of Warren E. Roberts edited by Robert E. Walls and George H. Schoemaker and published in 1989 can not be found in its entirity here. (Find its open worldcat record here.)

Congratulations to the current FolkPub staff on all this good work. Well-wishes go as well to FolkPub staff who served in recent years. Their efforts provided a significant foundation for present accomplishments.

Oct 30

More Published Book Reviews

I am happy to note the publication of some more reviews by some current and former student colleagues. Teri Klassen and Rhonda Fair both have reviews in the new issue of Museum Anthropology Review. Carrie Hertz has a review in the latest issue of Material Culture. Jodine Perkins has a review out today in JFRR.

Teri’s review is of Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt and Rhonda’s is of Playing Ourselves: Interpreting Native Histories at Historic Reconstructions. Because MAR is an open access journal, these reviews are available at no cost online. Carrie’s review is of The Silk Weavers of Kyoto: Family and Work in a Changing Traditional Industry. Material Culture is, to the best of my knowledge, a print-only journal. Find it in your nearest library here on Open WorldCat. Jodine’s review is of Long Gone, a narrative account of American farm life in the 1930s and 1940s. Like all JFRR reviews, hers is available for free online.

Oct 29

Museum Anthropology Review 2(2)

I am happy to announce the publication of Volume 2, Number 2 of Museum Anthropology Review. This issue features eight smart reviews and two fine articles. Please check it out here. Huge thanks go to everyone who has been supporting the effort–readers, reviewers, boosters, publishers, the IU LIbraries, and especially the journal’s generous authors.

Oct 2

Two Reviews

Congratulations to Suzanne Ingalsbe and Teri Klassen for each publishing book reviews this week. Suzanne reviewed Yard Art and Handmade Places: Extraordinary Expressions of Home (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008) by Jill Nokes with Pat Jasper in JFR Reviews. This review is available open access online here.

Teri reviewed Quilts in a Material World: Selections from the Winterthur Collection by Linda Eaton (New York: Abrams, 2007) for the July 2008 issue of Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture 6(2):205-207. Textile, published by Berg, is a commercial journal and the review is only available online in a toll access format. ($29.99 in pay per view!) Some libraries may provide electronic access at this point. The means by which the IU Bloomington libraries provide IU folks will electronic access can not yet get us to the latest issue (there is a 6 month delay for electronic access at IUB).

Congratulations to both reviewers. The hassle of getting to Teri’s review and the ease with which we can all read Suzanne’s reveals again the virtues of open access publishing in folklore, ethnomusicology and anthropology. Lets show JFRR some love!

Aug 26

Anthropology of/in Circulation: Join the Conversation

I want to call attention to a new project in which I played a part. “Played a part” fits especially because the document at the project’s center looks and acts a bit like a play script. The journal Cultural Anthropology has just published (volume 23, issue 3, 2008) a contribution titled “Anthropology of/in Circulation: The Future of Open Access and Scholarly Societies.” The article-length document was co-created by Christopher Kelty, Michael M. J. Fisher, Alex Golub, Kimberly Christen, Michael F. Brown, Tom Boellstorff and myself. In it, we use an interview/group discussion format to discuss changes in scholarly communication, professional societies, digital technologies, and the broader social contexts that are impacting the work of anthropology and neighboring fields (such as folklore and ethnomusicology, in which I work).

While the piece has the appearance of a transcribed discussion, it is actually a co-authored work in which we each contributed, in varying degrees, to the authoring of the whole. In other words, we “play” ourselves in the text (with relatively high fidelity to our “true” selves). It was written online using Google Docs over the course of about a month last spring. While much of what is attributed to any one participant is, or at least began as, “their own words” participants were able to make changes throughout the text as a whole. In the end, no one was pressured to “say” things that they were not comfortable saying, but the process, I think, tightened and enlivened the language as well as sharpened arguements and weeded out misunderstandings. While it lacks the halmarks, and perhaps some of the strengths, of a single authored work, I think that it is a lively and interesting piece in which the generic experiment is in keeping with the emergent topics about which we conversed. (Those who find value in the work of the Bahktin Circle and in contemporary linguistic anthropological work on voice, authorship, and participant roles should at least find the idea of this piece of interest.)

More important than the way that we put it together are the issues that we are seeking to explore. Here is the abstract:

In a conversation format, seven anthropologists with extensive expertise in new digital technologies, intellectual property, and journal publishing discuss issues related to open access, the anthropology of information circulation, and the future of scholarly societies. Among the topics discussed are current anthropological research on open source and open access; the effects of open access on traditional anthropological topics; the creation of community archives and new networking tools; potentially transformative uses of field notes and materials in new digital ecologies; the American Anthropological Association’s recent history with these issues, from the development of AnthroSource to its new publishing arrangement with Wiley-Blackwell; and the political economies of knowledge circulation more generally.

The best part is that you can now join the conversation. While it appears online conventionally in two toll access services (see  here for AnthroSource and here for Wiley InterScience), it is also available, for those who lack access to these resources, in article form in IUScholarWorks Repository  here. Most importantly for my purposes, it has been published in a full accessible CommentPress version in which readers can comment on, question, critique, and discuss the text as a whole or in a paragraph-by-paragraph function. I am a huge fan of CommentPress and I hope that this project will introduce new folks to this very useful software tool. Please visit the CommentPress version here (http://blog.culanth.org/incirculation/) and join the conversation. Tell your friends, tell your colleagues, tell your professors, tell your students.

For the record, these reuses were made possible because we utilized a SPARC author addendum. This is a valuable resource everyone should know about. See here and here and in the video here.

For my part, I really appreciated having the the opportunity to participate in this project. I want to thank the other contributors for their efforts and to acknowledge Kim and Mike Fortun the visionary co-editors of Cultural Anthropology who encouraged this project and saw it into existance.

Reasonable (and unreasonable) differences of opinion exist regarding the future of open access in anthropology and beyond. The other contributors and I share a hope that this project will help advance the conversation in a useful way. See you on the CommentPress site.

Aug 20

Jon Kay in JFRR

Drawing upon his own experience as a public folklorist and material culture scholar, Jon Kay has just published a review of In Good Keeping: Virginia’s Folklife Apprenticeships (Charlottesville: University of Virgina Press, 2008 in JFRR (Journal of Folklore Research Reviews), the web- or email-based review service produced here in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana.  Check our Jon’s review here and, while you are at the JFRR site, sign up for the email service. Its free and really valuable. Good work Jon.

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