Last November, it looked like some good things were on the horizon for Open Access and the American Anthropological Association’s publishing portfolio:

At this morning’s #AAA2021Baltimore roundtable on #OpenAccess publishing at @AmericanAnthro, Director of Publishing Janine McKenna announced plans to transition to #OpenAccess beginning in 2023. AND EVERYONE CHEERED.

— Dr. Z (@leah_zani) November 18, 2021

Everyone cheered, including me. After years of back and forth, it seemed that the AAA was finally going to make the shift to Open Access. But, the cheering didn’t last long. According to the recent announcement from the AAA, the move to open access is going to wait a bit longer (again). Why? Because the association has, once again, decided to continue its partnership with Wiley-Blackwell. Here’s the gist of the announcement:

Wiley will continue to host AAA’s portfolio of 20+ anthropology journals, including American Anthropologist, the association’s flagship publication as well as AnthroSource, AAA’s online portal. AnthroSource is the premier database of full-text anthropology articles, serving the research and teaching needs of scholars and practitioners in the United States and around the world.

You can read the full announcement here. So what happened? How did we go from the everyone cheering moment to “We’re just going to stick with Wiley again”? I have no idea, because none of the decision-making here is very transparent. Yes, as the announcement states, there was a process:

During a year-long process, AAA received input from many sources, including the Publishing Futures Committee and the Executive Board to review the requirements for the new agreement, draft a Request for Proposals (RFP), and identify qualified publishers.

Then what happened? This:

The proposals received were evaluated based on criteria that included their strategic alignment with AAA, the editorial support offered, production resources, publication management, and sales/marketing capabilities.

So they took a year, got input from many sources, including the Publishing Futures Committee and the Executive Board, drafted an RFP for potential publishers, and then evaluated those proposals. The result? According to AAA Executive Director Ed Liebow, “Wiley best aligned with the core values of the AAA’s publishing program – quality, breadth, accessibility, equity, and sustainability.”

It is completely unclear how that decision was actually made. We just get the announcement, months later, with the final decision. There’s a lot I’d like to know here about what happened–and why. What were the options? What looked promising? What were the main roadblocks and challenges? Why was this decision ultimately made, and who made it?

Now, I get that these things are complicated, and they cost money, and they take time. I also understand that making a shift to Open Access is not an easy task. And the AAA announcement does explicitly state that “moving toward more open access content is the long-term goal.” That’s good to hear–although it makes me wonder just how long-term we’re talking about here.

Sure, maybe there were no other options and this was the best one for the time being. Again, this stuff is complicated. I get it. That’s not really the issue. The issue here is more about how the decision-making process works, and how such decisions are actually communicated to AAA membership. The long story short here is that communication and transparency about these publishing decisions have been pretty terrible…but that’s pretty much how things have gone with this conversation for a long, long time.

In 2007, Chris Kelty wrote a post about the AAA’s first deal with Wiley. He had plenty to say about the move, but was still somewhat optimistic:

For my money, this is certainly not the end of the world, and I have faith that the new arrangement will actually improve various things about the AAA’s publishing program. I can honestly say that I support the move, and that I think the AAA did the right thing.

What Kelty called out as problematic was the process itself:

Unfortunately, that’s not the worst (or best) part: the process by which it happened has been demoralizing– more evidence that as a scholarly society the AAA does not see any need to communicate with its membership at large, solicit their input or operate in an even quasi-transparent manner that might send the message that they are doing this for the advancement of anthropology as a discipline and as a field of knowledge.

Just to give you an idea, here’s some of the language from that 2007 announcement (much of which Kelty shared in his post):

The AAA Executive Board’s decision to partner with Wiley-Blackwell was the result of a year-long process, centering on a detailed request for proposals, evaluation of publisher submissions, interviews, and reference checks with other scholarly societies. The request for proposals was developed with input from journal editors, authors and members who had communicated their concerns to AAA’s Executive Board, Committee on Scientific Communication, Committee on the Future of Print and Electronic Publishing, and staff over the past four years. The RFP was sent to nine publishers. Six responded with proposals, and five were interviewed.

Sound familiar? The year long process, the request for proposals, the input from boards and committees, etc., and then the final decision…with little explanation or communication about how and why that decision was made. That was 15 years ago, and much of the language sounds almost identical. Not much has changed. And so, here we are, in 2022, with another five year contract with Wiley, some promises about making Open Access the long-term goal, and the same old demoralizing process. I don’t know about you, but I’m definitely not cheering now. Before we can finally clear the way for Open Access, some things need to change in the decision-making, transparency, and communication departments. That would be a good start.

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist.

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Over the last few years, I’ve been immersing myself through social media in the world of micro-presses. These are very small-scale publishers, drawing from DIY, anarchist, and zine traditions, but making use of the recent proliferation of print-on-demad (POD) and small-run printing services. They’re usually run by one or a maybe handful of people largely doing it as a labor of love rather than as a substantive source of income. A couple of my favorite examples are Inside the Castle (run from my own hometown of Lawrence, KS) and Influx Press.

The thing I love about these presses is that they provide a space for publishing books that might not get published anywhere else, and they typically do it with such care and concern that the final products are beautiful objects to spend time with. For example, I love this amazing novel in card-deck form by BR Yeager put out recently by Inside the Castle. The story emerges in no particular or predefined order as you lay out the cards, and the experience is more than just reading – you are engrossed by the very process of sifting through the deck and splaying the cards out on the table. It’s really a wonderful thing that they’ve put out into the world.

Last year on twitter, I wondered whether there were any similar outlets for anthropology or academic publishing more broadly. Some para-academic examples come to mind: Punctum Books, Re.Press, Repeater, etc. But I couldn’t come up with any that were anthropology-focused (please let me know if there are any that I’ve missed!). And yet, there have been a lot of calls recently for new and experimental forms of ethnographic writing and engagement. My sense is that micro-presses could be one of the ways that those kinds of experiments are made tangible and available to wider audiences.

I know there are a lot of reasons why there aren’t dozens of anthropology micro-presses proliferating through the para-academic world – none of which are reducible to a lack of interest, skill, or creativity. The largest hurdles are institutional. Most of us simply don’t have the time amidst an academic career to invest in organizing a press and doing the work of editing and assembling books and getting them out to people who might be interested in them. And this kind of work is not rewarded or even noticed by the academy – no one is going to get a job or tenure because they’ve organized a para-academic press, no matter how valuable and good the publications are. These are all the same or similar problems that many people have discussed around open access publishing, blogging, and engaging in other alternative publication and communication strategies.

Coupled with that are other issues that are endemic to the broader academic world, to publishing in particular, and that could be compounded in a world of academic micro-presses. Although I’d hope that the people interested in starting and maintaining a press would be conscious of issues of equity, access, and justice, looking at the field of micro-presses that I know about (and this may be my own limitation, in part), many of them are run by white men and many of their publications are authored by white men. That’s not necessarily to disparage them or the work that they do, but if micro-presses simply replicate the same inequalities that exist in the broader publishing world, is it really worth it? These are also questions relevant to blogging, open access, para-academic journals, zines, and other alternative publishing models. Given that these approaches are additional labor, and uncompensated and unrewarded/unrecognized labor, the people who will be able to do it are those who have some level of privilege, whose positions are relatively secure. In other words, nothing about micro-presses or other alternative publishing models resolves these inequalities, and they can make things worse as discussions in the last few years about a certain OA anthropology journal demonstrate.

I don’t have answers to these problems, and I don’t want to suggest that micro-publishing or any other publishing platforms or models will resolve them. But, given calls for greater experimentation, we clearly need more spaces for new and experimental modes of writing and engaging with ethnographic research. My goal here is just to open up the discussion and think about micro-presses and the affordances they offer as well as the challenges they create or, at least, make apparent. I’ll be honest, I have a vision of creating my own micro-press specifically dedicated to publishing speculative ethnography – another project I don’t have time for! But if I do it someday, I’d like to do it in a way that is cognizant of and working to address some of the issues I’ve described here, and I’m open to discussing what that looks like.

Jeremy Trombley

Jeremy is an environmental anthropologist and currently a Postdoc at the University of Oregon studying watersheds and glaciers in the Pacific Northwest.

www.jeremytrombley.com

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On the morning of March 30, 2021, three articles on the culture of harassment within archaeology dropped. And it was epic. Across three articles, Barbara (Barb) Voss reviewed and analyzed current research about the prevalence and patterns of harassment within our discipline. Most useful was her list of proven interventions that have demonstrable results in reducing harassment. Most difficult and heart wrenching to read were her own personal accounts dealing with harassment and how it impacted her career decisions. 

Reading these articles was tough, as I knew it would be, and it occurred to me that there are so many of us who had nowhere to turn when this happened to someone we knew or even ourselves. When we reported an incident of harassment, we were told that we had to figure it out or get out. That is messed up. The significance of these sorts of articles has the immense potential to change how we do archaeology – it could fundamentally change how we could feel safe in our professional spaces.     

The three articles, Documenting Cultures of Harassment in Archaeology (2021); Disrupting Cultures of Harassment in Archaeology (2021); and Using Public Health Interventions to Prevent Harassment in Archaeology (2021) are all Open Access, and I cannot recommend them enough. Over the course of the last few months, Barb and I have been talking through the responses and through the articles themselves. Based on the significance of our discussions, the impact it could have, and her thoughtful responses, I thought it important to make it more formal, and so I requested an interview. The interview took place on a shared document, in comments, and with an abundance of trust. 

Also, just to say, these issues, as we all know, are not limited to archaeology, but are discipline wide concerns.

Uzma: Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Your articles have already become touchstones for discussion around harassment in our discipline. And perhaps we should start there/here. In your article you mentioned you are using the broad term of  “harassment” in recognition that gender and sexuality are not the sole factors in professional abuses of power. Your examples span across decades — important decades in which much work around harassment and safety have happened. Could I ask you to speak broadly about the ways we understand “harassment” to have changed over time? 

Barb: I think it’s helpful to think of harassment is a useful umbrella term, one that describes behaviors that share four specific attributes: (1) they occur in work and educational settings; (2) they involve an abuse of power; (3) they are interpersonal; and (4) they convey hostility, exclusion, objectification, or second-class status based on the perceived identity of the target. 

When Kate Clancy – one of the leading researchers on harassment in field sciences – testified to Congress in 2018, she introduced a framing I find very helpful: “come-ons” and “put-downs.” 

“Come-ons” are unwanted sexual attention, while “put-downs” involve speech and actions that marginalize or exclude the target(s) by stigmatizing their real or perceived identity. While “come-ons” receive the most media attention, “put-downs” are the most common, and they can cause just as much emotional harm and career damage as unwanted sexual attention. So it is important to address all forms of harassment – sexual, identity-based, physical and non-physical, direct and indirect – to remove barriers to participation in archaeology and related fields.

Although harassment has been most commonly used to refer to abuses of power related to gender and sexuality, Kimberlé Crenshaw reminds us that, “Anything that’s meant to address gender inequality has to include a racial lens, and anything that’s meant to address racial inequality has to include a gender lens.” The research conducted to date shows that BIPOC archaeologists, queer archaeologists, and archaeologists with disabilities are disproportionately affected by harassment.

Uzma: Can I ask you to speak a bit about the ‘barriers to change’ that you were able to identify, including the normalization, the exclusionary practices, gate keeping, etc.? 

Barb: In “Disrupting Cultures of Harassment in Archaeology,” I identify normalization as one of five key barriers to harassment prevention (the other four are exclusionary practices, fraternization, gatekeeping, and obstacles to reporting).  

In survey research on harassment, respondents commonly described harassment as part of the culture of archaeology, something that is socially expected and that is “normal.” These findings should be a wake-up call for all archaeologists. 

From a trauma-informed perspective, this normalization of harassment is understandable. Survey research indicates that 15%–46% of men archaeologists and 34%–75% of women archaeologists have experienced one or more harassment events during their careers. It’s likely that even more archaeologists have witnessed harassment directly or know of harassment occurring through second-hand accounts.

The resulting collective experience of trauma in our discipline is staggering to contemplate. My hope is that the two-article series provides archaeologists and others in allied fields with tools for dismantling this normalization of harassment. 

Uzma: Significant for such work are the discussions of quantifiable survey results related to harassment in the field. Could you talk a bit about how you selected the surveys?

Barb: My primary objective in writing the first article, “Documenting Cultures of Harassment in Archaeology,” was to aggregate and analyze the growing body of research about harassment in archaeology and related fields. There has been so much research done over the last ten years, but it is really hard to find it and some content is behind paywalls, which poses barriers to access, especially for early career and non-academic archaeologists.

Also, the sheer volume of new studies has made it difficult to keep up with the literature. I wanted to bring all that new information together in one place, so that if you are trying to make the case for better policies and procedures in your workplace – whether academia, museums, cultural resource management, or government and NGO – you can bring this one article to your dean or director or human resources manager and say, “Look, there is a real problem with harassment in archaeology. It has been verified through methodologically-sound, peer-reviewed research. And we need to take action now so that we protect our people and so that our department or company doesn’t become the next #metoo news story.”

Once I had gathered all the studies I could find, I used three criteria to select studies for analysis:  

1.     The study had to either focus exclusively on archaeology or present study findings in a way that allowed content related to archaeology to be disaggregated from general results;  
2.     The study followed an approved human subjects protocol or had equivalent procedures in place to protect research subjects’ well-being and anonymity; and
3.     The study had passed peer review or had been publicly presented in a juried venue such as a professional conference.  

During 2018-2020, I located twelve studies that met these criteria. Seven had robust quantitative components. Initially, I had hoped to be able to combine the results of these studies into a single set of metrics (what is often called a meta-analysis). However, it soon became clear that this would not be possible, because there was so much variation in survey methodologies and especially subject recruitment methods.

For example, many studies about harassment in archaeology recruited participants through social media, which raises questions about whether self-selection biases, technology access, and social network pathways influenced the composition of the study population. Other studies used professional society membership rosters to recruit participants, which on the surface might seem to resolve these issues. But, students, entry-level professionals, and other marginalized archaeologists tend to have low participation rates in professional societies. So it’s unlikely that membership-based surveys can fully capture the experiences of the most vulnerable archaeologists. So, both crowd-sourced and roster-based quantitative surveys have value, even if their results cannot be easily integrated.

The other problem is that very few of the studies published results for archaeologists of color, non-heterosexual archaeologists, archaeologists with disabilities, and trans, non-binary, and agender archaeologists. Several noted that this information was originally collected, but that because of the low number of participants in those categories, they could not disaggregate results by race or sexual orientation without potentially compromising the anonymity of the respondents. There’s a huge research gap as a result and we need to develop better methodologies that ethically document the experiences of archaeologists of color and other marginalized archaeologists.

While initially I planned to only focus on peer-reviewed or juried research, when these gaps became apparent, I expanded the paper in two directions. I added a very brief overview of the history of gender equity research in archaeology, which had tangentially addressed harassment as a mechanism for exclusion. Some of this equity research included a focus on class that was often missing from more recent surveys and interview studies. 

I also developed a section on grassroots activism: conference actions, ad-hoc groups, blogs, art installations, and journalism. This was one of the hardest sections to write because there is so much amazing stuff being done, and with the strict word limit in American Antiquity articles, I couldn’t include everything. I decided to focus on examples involving archaeology students, early career archaeologists, queer archaeologists, and archaeologists of color, because these are exactly the segments of our community that are underrepresented in formal research studies. 

Uzma: What were some of the surprises (or not) that emerged through analysis of the quantitative research?

Barb: Even as a survivor who has been intermittently involved in sexual violence prevention and activism for much of my adult life, I was still shocked by the high frequency of harassment in archaeology. Surveys results indicate that 15% to 46% of men archaeologists, and 34% to 75% of women archaeologists, have experienced harassment during their training and career, and that 5% to 8% of men archaeologists, and 15% to 26% of women archaeologists, have experienced unwanted sexual contact, including sexual assault. This high prevalence places archaeology in the same range as the military and the entertainment industry – two economic sectors that have notoriously high frequencies of harassment.

And I think we all should be shocked by this, because it’s absolutely horrific. No one should ever have to endure harassment to get an education or pursue a career. 

Some of the research in archaeology confirms well-documented patterns in educational and workplace harassment: harassers most commonly target early career archaeologists, archaeologists are most commonly harassed by other archaeologists (often members of their own research team), and archaeologists in marginalized groups experience harassment at higher-than-average rates.

One particularly interesting finding, which was consistent across many studies, is that there are specific gendered patterns to harassment in archaeology: women archaeologists are most commonly harassed by men and by superiors, while men archaeologists are more commonly harassed by peers of all genders.

It is also important to stress that while quantitative research reveals broad patterns, many people’s experiences of harassment do not conform to these dominant trends. This is why qualitative research – both open-ended survey responses and interviews – are so important, because they capture the full breadth of the problem.

Uzma: I found the section on interviews so revelatory after reading the survey results. One of the key points of analysis that you highlight from Laura Heath-Stouts work is how harassment places a ‘cognitive burden’ on those who have experienced it. Can I ask that you speak a bit more about that, in relation to (if you feel comfortable), your own experiences that you shared in the articles? In some sense, what I am asking is how do we work through the cognitive burden? 

Barb: Laura Health-Stout’s research, along with other studies, helps us understand why harassment has such a long-term negative impact on education and careers even when the harassment itself is short-lived or does not specifically pose a barrier of access to professional opportunities.

I understand this cognitive burden as having two components: one immediate, and the other quite long-lasting. To give an example from my own experience, in “Documenting Cultures of Harassment,” I describe a field project where a male colleague exposed himself to me in the shower facility. A few days later, while drunk, he tried to barge in on me when I was in the toilet. His behavior towards me was very aggressive and I feared it would continue to escalate. When I reported his behavior to my supervisor, she made it clear that she was not going to take any action to protect me from my colleague’s behavior.

For the remainder of that project, a huge amount of my mental energy was dedicated to tracking my colleague’s movements and his schedule. I was constantly performing this intricate calculus to avoid being caught alone with him: adjusting my paths of movement, timing my rest breaks and bathroom visits for times when he was occupied elsewhere, and isolating myself socially so that I would not be inadvertently drawn into meals or gatherings where he might show up. The archaeology work that I was there to do became secondary: I was counting days until the project was over and I could return home.

Afterwards, the mental calculus continued. Archaeology is a small field. I knew that I would not be able to completely avoid contact with him, so I strategized about how to minimize those interactions and ensure that I only saw him in public contexts with others present. I also carried a lot of anger against my project supervisor for disregarding my complaints. That lack of trust at times carried into other professional relationships and other projects.

When doing the research for these articles, it was so transformative to read similar accounts in the words of other survivors. Because harassment is by definition interpersonal, it is so easy to doubt yourself, especially when supervisors or other people senior to you disregard your concerns.

For me, healing from harassment is an ongoing process, one that is never truly finished. Having been victimized multiple times in archaeological settings, by other archaeologists, I walk with that personal history every day when I go to work, do field and research, attend a conference, or visit a museum. Usually it is in the background, but it is never fully out of sight. I have benefitted immensely from talking with other survivors (both informally and in organized groups) and from professional counselling. And I feel very fortunate and privileged that I am now in a professional role – tenured professor – from which I can talk openly about my experiences without fear of loss of employment.

Uzma:  I really appreciated the consideration of a trauma informed approach that you outline in your article, and I wondered if I might ask you to speak more about the importance of such an approach and what some key aspects might be to keep in mind, etc..

Barb: Trauma-informed approaches came out of grassroots activism in the 1970s and 1980s – early rape crisis centers, movements against domestic violence, sexual assault survivor networks, and veteran activist communities. They have now been validated by public health research, and have become the widely adopted standard of care endorsed by medical and legal associations as well as government health agencies. Trauma-informed care has also been slowly percolating into educational settings, and during COVID-19, we started to see this language being used more widely in academia.

The core principles of a trauma-informed approach are straightforward. First, an individual or group is more likely than not to have a history of trauma. We don’t need to ask about individual experiences, we can just assume that many people’s present-day experiences are shaped by their history.

Second, institutions and “business-as-usual” organizational procedures have the potential to retraumatize individuals. This is especially relevant to harassment, which occurs within an institutional context: workplace, school, organization, project, etc. So by definition, survivors experience harassment both as a result of the perpetrator’s actions and in relation to institutional culture and organizational responses.

Third, empowering survivors and other vulnerable members of organizations can transform these environments to deter further abuses of power and to support healing and recovery. General guiding principles include institutional transparency and honesty, including admitting when harm is done; building cultural competency; actively affirming that all members of an institution are valued; and fostering self-determination, privacy, and agency.

For myself, I try to bring these questions to my professional practice: What structures of power are at play at this moment? Who are the most vulnerable participants in this setting – are their needs being met, their voices heard, and their dignity respected? Who is empowered to make meaningful decisions, and who is being excluded? Can that be changed? Am I listening enough? Am I being honest about my actions and intentions, as well as my limitations and constraints? Am I willing to prioritize the well-being of others over my research and professional goals? Perhaps most importantly, what would be the more caring response to this situation?

Uzma: I think understanding the significance of interventions is really important. I invite you to close out our conversation with a list of what we can do and perhaps if there are one or two things you might want to highlight. 

Barb: The most important thing to do is to listen to survivors and other vulnerable members of your organization or research team. They will know where the problems are and what can be done to stop them. In addition to “open door” policies and transparent complaint procedures, regular confidential climate surveys can be especially important to identify problems as they are emerging.

Along with that, each of us can emphasize that reporting harassment is a courageous act that supports the health of the organization and the discipline.

On an organization level, every professional society, university, museum, research institute, and publisher needs to clearly state that harassment is a form of scientific and professional misconduct – similar to plagiarism, falsification of data, human subjects violations, embezzlement, and trafficking in antiquities – and will be treated as such.

For laboratories, field research projects, and other educational and training programs, codes of conduct with clear mechanisms of enforcement have been shown to dramatically reduce harassment.

Finally, prevent potential abuses of power by gatekeepers by establishing open and transparent procedures for advising, supervision, funding, permits, hiring, and other high-stakes career processes.

The details of these and other interventions will of course vary by context. For example, Carol Colannino and her colleagues are piloting a suite of interventions for field schools that specifically address the residential learning environment and faculty-student power differentials. The important thing to know is that whatever our roles in archaeology or in allied fields, there are actions each of us can take to prevent harassment before it starts and support survivors when it does.

Uzma: Thank you so much for this interview, for the work that you have done in bringing these articles into circulation, and for all the unseen labor that you do to keep our discipline equitable and just. 

Barb: Thank you for inviting me! And before we wrap up, I’d just like to mention one more thing – I’m currently working with an amazing team of translators to produce Spanish versions of both articles, which will also be released open access, hopefully later this year (2021).

Editorial Update: The Spanish version of both articles has been released open access.

Actualización: el 17 de noviembre de 2021, la revista académica Latin American Antiquity y Cambridge University Press publicaron las traducciones al español de una serie de dos artículos. Ambos artículos son de libre acceso.

Documentación de culturas del acoso en la arqueología

Contra las culturas del acoso en la arqueología

Whether you yourself are a survivor or whether you have—or someone you know has—witnessed harassment and sexual assault, you are not alone. Support is available. If you are not sure where to start, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) provides free and confidential support to survivors and to those who care about them. Support is available 24 hours per day, 7 days per week by phone (800-656-4673) and via live chat at https://www.rainn.org/. En español, llame al (800-656-4673) a la Línea de Ayuda Nacional Online de Asalto Sexual o comuníquese a través de la opción “Chat Ahora”: https://www.rainn.org/es.

Si tú eres un sobreviviente o si has sido testigo—o alguien que tú conoces lo ha sido—de acoso y agresión sexual, no estás sole. Existe ayuda disponible. Si no estás segure por dónde empezar, la  Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network (RAINN) provee atención gratuita y confidencial a les sobrevivientes y sus seres queridos. La atención está disponible 24 horas del día, 7 días de la semana. En español, llame al (800-656-4673) a la Línea de Ayuda Nacional Online de Asalto Sexual o comuníquese a través de la opción “Chat Ahora”: https://www.rainn.org/es.

Barbara L. Voss is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University and the incoming Director of the Stanford Archaeology Center. She is a historical archaeologist who investigates the modern world through themes of colonization, diaspora, and sexuality.

Uzma Z. Rizvi

Uzma Z. Rizvi is an associate professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY, and a Visiting Scholar at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan. Her current work focuses on Ancient Pakistan and UAE, during the third millennium BCE. She utilizes poetics as a mode through which to push the limits of archaeological theory. Additionally, her research focuses on ancient subjectivity, intimate architecture; memory, war, and trauma in relationship to the urban fabric, critical heritage studies at the intersections of contemporary art and history, and finally, epistemological critiques of the discipline in the service of decolonization.
Previous posts can be accessed via https://savageminds.org/author/uzma/

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There’s news in the world of open access anthropology. The gates have opened, just a bit more. Maybe now, finally, is the time for a bigger shift toward more anthropologists supporting and advocating for open access scholarship. While we do have some excellent OA options in anthropology (such as Cultural Anthropology), we could use more. Well, good things are happening. A couple days ago, Berghahn Anthropology announced a new open access initiative:

We are VERY excited to announce that the Berghahn Open Anthro initiative will be implemented in 2020! All 13 #anthropology journals will be fully #openaccess starting with the 2020 vols. Read the press release: https://t.co/JbAM5mEMV8 @acorsin @KUnlatched

— BerghahnAnthropology (@BerghahnAnthro) January 23, 2020

This is great to hear, and I look forward to hearing more about how this all plays out. As some of you know, this is one core issue that we have covered on this site and even more on its previous iteration. Expect more.

Personally, I’ve been a bit quiet on the OA front (and blogging in general) for the past couple of years. But things are changing. The Anthrodendum folks are looking to reignite the fires around here, and this will include more coverage of open access publishing and why it matters.

For now, I’ll leave you with Keith Hart’s words on open access and anthropology, from my interview with him back in 2012. I opened the interview asking Keith to talk broadly about his take on open access. Here’s his response:

Obviously I am in favor of it. The form that the discussion takes in contemporary anthropology seems to be specifically American, where the contradictions of established practice are most acute. In the most general sense, OA is a strategy of resistance to privatization of the commons, any commons. As such it is central to the intellectual property wars. But here I think we are talking about a much narrower issue of how to make research publications freely available without undermining their role as cultural capital in academic career advancement. This reflects the interests of a mass of unemployed young researchers who can’t afford to pay for information and yet still hope to find academic employment some day. The tension is between maintaining the intellectual commons and conserving ideas as private property. The situation is exacerbated in American anthropology by the peculiarly obdurate policy of the professional association (AAA) which elevates a closed regime of private production for profit above sharing knowledge with the general public.

Here’s to a renewed strategy of resistance to the closing of our academic commons. Onward, anthropology.

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist.

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Over the past two weeks, public allegations of abuse at the (formerly) open-access journal HAU have touched off what one scholar has called “a fractal socio-technical controversy exploding in all directions.” Anchored, in part, by the Twitter channel #hautalk, responses from scholars across career stages have grappled with issues from power and privilege in a time of academic precarity to the status of the anthropological canon. Projects with no institutional connection to HAU have come forward to explain how they operate and what values guide their work. And while few have seriously suggested that the failings of one journal should cast doubt on the viability of open-access publishing more broadly, at least one commenter has lamented that we do not yet have a sustainable and ethical model of open access around which to organize.

In this post, we want to argue that such models already abound and that anthropologists ought to rally around them, rather than regarding open access as a proleptic promise that never quite arrives. The six of us draw on our firsthand experience as participants in a variety of publishing projects and observers of the scholarly communication landscape in anthropology and adjacent fields. We affirm, informed by scholars of indigenous and traditional knowledge, that openness is not an untrammeled good, and we endorse the cultivation of a diverse publishing ecology in which experiments can flourish and one size need never fit all. Yet, as the executive committee of an open-access publishing cooperative called Libraria, we also put forward our actually existing model of open-access publishing and invite engagement with it in the here and now.

As the conveners of Allegra Lab did in their own reflection last week, we want to acknowledge that the history of Libraria has intersected with that of HAU and its embattled editor-in-chief, Giovanni da Col. The idea for Libraria grew out of discussions between two of us (Willinsky and Corsín Jiménez) and da Col at a 2014 event in Madrid. HAU and da Col were active participants in the initiative’s early stages, as a research site in a broader study of open-access cooperatives. By 2016, though, HAU withdrew from full membership in Libraria and recast its role as that of an observer, in the context of disagreements over Libraria’s organizational structure and concerns that Libraria might compete with HAU for institutional support. The 2017 editorial in which da Col announced HAU’s retreat from open access went so far as to charge that initiatives like Libraria “do not offer much hope at this historical conjuncture.”

By synthesizing lessons already learned from the many successful open-access projects in anthropology and beyond and by describing the portfolio-scale model that we have developed at Libraria, we aim to push back against this statement of hopelessness and to turn the present moment into an occasion for a renewed sense of collaboration and common purpose.

Seven Slogans for an Open Anthropology

We have organized this review of best practices around seven programmatic statements, in an effort to shift the discussion around open access beyond insider debates that, one of us (Kelty) has observed, are “maddeningly complex and ultimately very boring.” The details matter, of course, and assuming that someone else would worry about them is part of how scholars ended up with the broken system of scholarly communication we have. Still, the six of us do not believe that mastering the intricacies of OA-speak (or putting one’s own research on hold to do so) should be a precondition for taking a stand as an advocate of open access.

Small is beautiful

Individual publications with a clear sense of scope, a small community of supporters, and access to fairly modest institutional resources can succeed on an open-access basis. Indeed, such publications may be less likely to succumb to what Jason Baird Jackson has called “the drive to do big and fast open access.” We offer the examples of two Libraria members. Limn, a scholarly magazine based in the United States, publishes themed issues—both online and in print—on a range of contemporary problems. Valuation Studies, a journal based in Europe and supported in part by the Swedish Research Council, fosters exchange in an emerging, transdisciplinary field. Each draws on a combination of volunteer and paid labor to produce a publication that seeks to move particular conversations forward. Neither aspires to become a publishing juggernaut. Keeping overhead costs low insulates these two projects from the pressure to recruit and retain a sprawling cast of sponsors.

But scale matters

Another member of Libraria, Cultural Anthropology, has advantages that Limn and Valuation Studies do not. The journal is sponsored by the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA), a section of the American Anthropological Association, and the dues paid by the SCA’s more than one thousand members help to cover the journal’s production costs. So do the royalties that the SCA receives in connection with the journal’s backfiles, which have not (yet) been ungated. These sources of support have allowed Cultural Anthropology to build one of the most dynamic websites in the discipline, with peer-reviewed articles sitting side by side with short-form content, films, and podcasts. Yet the costs of this platform (and its successor, presently in development) have been borne almost entirely by the SCA. Wouldn’t it be better if the costs and capacities of platforms like this were distributed across three or five or ten publishing projects? Here, scholars in the United States and Europe have much to learn from our colleagues in the global South, where initiatives like SciELO have long been built around a shared open-source platform.

Attention is scarcer than money

In an editorial published last week, da Col acknowledged that the funding model at the heart of the HAU Network for Ethnographic Theory had proved “too volatile and dependent on departmental budget finances.” This was, regrettably, apparent to many of us watching from the sidelines. Academic departments do not generally have dedicated funding lines for supporting publications not published by the department, meaning that projects like HAU must compete for attention with the many other claims on a department’s discretionary funds. Moreover, even if a project like HAU did attract an exceptional commitment of ongoing support, this arrangement would effectively cannibalize support for any other project that came along. Part of doing our “homework” as open-access advocates is to follow the existing flows of funding within colleges and universities, and the present reality is that those pass through academic libraries (some of which, it should be noted, did participate in HAU-NET). Even then, the message we have heard from the librarians with whom we have consulted about Libraria is that libraries cannot be asked to support open-access publishing one journal—one conference call, one invoice—at a time. This is not a reasonable demand on their attention.

APCs are not the answer

HAU’s previous funding model also included levying article processing charges (APCs) from authors who were understood to have access to funds earmarked for this purpose. As Emily Yates-Doerr’s post on this blog detailed, though, the way that this policy was carried out raised the specter of a “pay-to-play” arrangement for accepted articles and led to communication with authors that can only be described as a shakedown. Despite the widespread perception that open access is synonymous with APCs, these charges are far from the only way of funding open access and have been critiqued for reinscribing inequities between rich and poor institutions, facilitating journal rackets, and being susceptible to the same unsustainable increases that afflict subscription pricing. An international symposium devoted to “Envisioning a World Beyond APCs” recently charted a number of possible paths forward, building on a range of actually existing alternatives. As APCs become one more revenue stream for commercial publishers (and as funders begin to signal their impatience with this model), energy is gathering around projects that are open and free for both authors and readers.

Libraries are more than piggy banks

On either side of the Atlantic, libraries are flexing their purchasing power and walking away from exorbitantly priced “big deals” with commercial publishers. While moves like this are freeing up budgetary resources, librarians have also warned open-access advocates not to just assume that these resources are theirs for the taking. The instrumental relationship of vendor and client must give way to partnerships structured around meaningful consultation. Yet it is important to underscore that libraries do not simply write checks: they are publishers in their own right and sites of invention where new tools and services are being created. Museum Anthropology Review is one open-access journal that is capacitated by the vision, investment, and labor of a library publisher. Other publishing projects have looked to libraries for a more discrete set of services, from the LOCKSS model of digital preservation to products like Avalon, the media management system that powers Cultural Anthropology’s Sound + Vision section.

University presses are not the enemy

One unfortunate effect of HAU’s retreat from open access was the negative light in which it placed the University of Chicago Press, as the journal’s new publisher. Let us be clear: we support university presses as they work out how they can best participate in an open-access ecology. Indeed, Current Anthropology, which is sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and published on a subscription basis by the University of Chicago Press, is a Libraria member. The situation for university presses and other independent publishers is a tricky one, because these organizations frequently rely on a profitable journals program to cross-subsidize their less profitable books division. But open-access experiments are underway, whether at the scale of a single journal (as with Environmental Humanities, published by Duke University Press) or an entire publishing program (as with the Collabra initiative at the University of California Press). Meanwhile, new university presses are being founded on an open-access model, including Athabasca University Press, UCL Press, and Helsinki University Press. The one appeal we would make to our colleagues in this sector is to be honest with us: the doublespeak used by HAU to describe its “‘free-access’-cum-subscription model” is not helping anyone.

The next battle is for infrastructure

As libraries plainly state their intention to “responsibly transition funding for journal subscriptions toward funding for open dissemination,” commercial publishers are beginning to back away from the subscription model and are shifting their focus from content to infrastructure. Leading the way is Elsevier, which has rebranded itself from an academic content provider to an “information analytics company.” Through its aggressive buy-up of research infrastructure from the reference management software Mendeley to the institutional repository bepress to the altmetrics provider PlumX, Elsevier has inserted itself into virtually every stage of scholarly knowledge production. Clarivate Analytics is not far behind, with a product line that extends from Web of Science (arbiters of the Journal Impact Factor) to the manuscript management system ScholarOne and the reviewer database Publons. This move toward vertical integration supplies these companies with granular data on circulation, citation, and engagement. The endgame here, in our analysis, is to define metrological publics and then to design data-intensive services that cater to them—a business model that stands to be far more profitable than trying to lock down content in the age of SciHub. Unless we want the horizons of our scholarship to be defined by these algorithmic enclosures, academics must begin to direct resources toward open scholarly infrastructures. Initiatives like Érudit and Knowledge Unlatched point the way.

The Libraria Model

The core insight of the Libraria model is that we can redirect the existing flows of money in scholarly publishing to support a sustainable and ethical open-access ecology. Who will pay for it? It is already being paid for. By displacing commercial publishers and their 30–40 percent profit margin from the center of the model, the savings effected are enough to maintain existing levels of service and to apply the freed-up surplus to some combination of reductions in overall spending and new cooperative investments.

In this diagram, which depicts the status quo in anthropology and adjacent disciplines, the commercial publisher sits at the center. Authors and journal editors provide the publisher with content and services for free, while scholarly societies earn enough to lull them into what one of us (LaFlamme, with Nina Brown and Sarah Lyon) has called “a condition of learned helplessness.” Libraries, meanwhile, pay these publishers ever-escalating subscription fees, which they are often prohibited from publicly disclosing; ironically, libraries are also the ones tasked with denying access to nonsubscribers through the maintenance of elaborate authentication systems. As a result, the scholarly output of entire fields of knowledge can only be accessed by readers who are: a) affiliated with an institution that can afford a subscription; b) affiliated with an institution in a country that qualifies for philanthropic access, or; c) a member of the right scholarly society. Other readers are left to rely on preprints deposited in institutional repositories, open their wallets for pay-per-view access, or else turn to the pirate sites.

In this second diagram, which depicts the Libraria model, many things stay the same. Authors, editors, and reviewers still work together to develop a submitted manuscript into a publishable article, and societies still get income from the journals they sponsor (if perhaps not at the same level as they did before). But instead of a commercial publisher at the center of the model, we now have a mission-driven, transparently governed cooperative, Libraria. Rather than paying subscription fees to the commercial publishers, library members pay into the cooperative over a fixed multiyear term. This gives journals that are currently published on a subscription basis the stability they need to “flip” to open access. Libraria’s focus on established journals means that our model provides continuity with the editorial legacy of these publications and ensures that scholars do not need to choose between publishing open access and publishing in titles that hiring and tenure committees know and value.

So who would do the actual publishing? The answer comes in two parts:

1. If a journal wants to continue its relationship with an existing publisher and if the publisher is willing to work with Libraria on capping costs and offsetting payments made to the cooperative when selling larger bundles, then the journal could continue to be published just as it was before (except open access!). Instead of collecting subscription fees, the publisher would receive a direct payment from Libraria.
2. If a journal’s existing publisher does not wish to participate in Libraria, then the journal will be published on a platform maintained and staffed by the cooperative, likely in conjunction with one or more library publishers. In cheeky tribute to a road not taken during the health-care reform debate in the United States during 2009 and 2010, we have come to refer to this scenario as “the public option.” Maintaining a publishing infrastructure of our own would also allow us to work with editorial teams who are rebooting a publisher-owned title that they were forced to abandon.

There are more details to share (and others to be rigorously worked out in the months ahead), but we want to close by emphasizing that the challenge of the Libraria model is not, ultimately, a financial one. The challenge is to develop, first, relations of mutuality, and second, processes of coordination among a diverse group of actors that are not accustomed to working together in cooperative ways. This is the challenge set forth by Anand Pandian, in daring us to approach open access with “minds open to being remade by the unexpected.” This has been our shared project since Libraria was established in 2015: to create the conditions for a care-ful ecology of open-access publishing that marks a principled break with the extractive system we now have.

Many others have joined us in this work, including Libraria’s Governing Council, our Advisory Board, and the charter library members whose support we gratefully acknowledge: Duke University, Iowa State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rice University, the University of Rhode Island, and the University of California system. Will you join us too? Whether you are a librarian who is looking to expand your institution’s commitment to open access, or a publisher who is surveying the landscape and wanting to explore a different revenue model, or a journal editor who’s willing to have a low-commitment conversation, or a newly elected member of a society board who is starting to think that a new direction is needed: we invite you to reach out to us at join@libraria.cc. As we collectively process the many lessons of the #hautalk moment, let’s also start working toward the world we want to win.

Marcel LaFlamme is Visiting Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington. Dominic Boyer is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University. Kirsten Bell is Professor of Social Anthropology in the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Roehampton. Alberto Corsín Jiménez is Reader in Social Anthropology at the Spanish National Research Council. Christopher Kelty is Professor in the Institute for Society and Genetics and the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. John Willinsky is Khosla Family Professor of Education at Stanford University and the founding director of the Public Knowledge Project. Together, they serve as the executive committee of the open-access publishing cooperative Libraria.

Guest Contributor

This account is used to upload posts by guest contributors to the blog. For more information about contributing to anthro{dendum} please see our contact page.

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Taylor R. Genovese is a PhD student in the Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology program at Arizona State University. He has a BA and an MA in Anthropology and is interested in radical (techno)politics, the anthropology of outer space, utopian futures, and multimodal ethnography. He is also a blogger at Footnotes (http://footnotesblog.com/ ), a new anthropology group blog dedicated to the practice of being multimodal, anticolonial, and iconoclastic. More at: http://taylorgenovese.com/  and on Twitter @trgenovese –RA

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Ryan A: Hey, remember that time when you posted on twitter about the AAA takedown notice? What did you think about that notice?

Taylor G: [laughs] You know, that tweet is a good lesson for academics to never underestimate what kinds of social media content will go viral. When I reached 150 retweets, I was pretty shocked. When I reached 750, I was just laughing to myself at the never-ending notifications. When it reached 1,700 retweets and 4,100 likes, I was fairly certain the AAA was going to order its hit squad after me at the annual meeting.

But I think there is a valid reason why my rather unnuanced, iconoclastic snark ended up striking such a nerve in this era of academic precarity: people are feeling the corporate noose tighten ever quicker around the neck of our universities. The wealth disparity between administrators and, not only professors, but the bulk of academia—untenured, precarious lecturers and graduate students—mirror the enormous disparity between large academic publishers and the scholars that provide them unpaid labor in the form of writing manuscripts, reviewing them, and serving on editorial and advisory boards.

To me, the AAA notice unfortunately signaled to the member base that the organization was going to be siding with the large, exploitative journal corporations rather than its membership. One sentence in particular irked me: “AAA has put the author agreement in place to protect authors, and to prevent unauthorized or inappropriate usage.” Exactly from whom is the author being protected? Those pesky hustlers on the street peddling academic articles? (“No thanks, Bob, I’ve read enough bootlegged anthropology articles about Papua New Guinea; let me know when you get something multispecies in!”) I actually think most of us would be thrilled to find that our articles were being printed out and hungrily consumed by a general audience! After all, we’re not being paid by the publishers to write them.

Instead, the second part of the statement shows what’s really going on. The “unauthorized or inappropriate usage” of our writing ends up undermining the incredibly high institutional access fees that the journal publishers charge; including the $20-40 single-use charges it imposes on independent scholars. As the author, we never see any of that money. Does the AAA see any of that money? At least a large portion of it goes directly to the large journal publishers themselves.

As I said in my original tweet, the CEO of Wiley makes over $4 million year. Erik Engstom, the CEO of the Relx Group, which used to be Elsevier, makes £10.5 million a year. That’s $14 million. Insanity!

Even if you aren’t the type to hum The Internationale in your sleep before throwing Molotovs in the street, I think you can appreciate the incredibly unjust theft that is happening in academic publishing.

RA: So I hear you have a new article you’re working on that’s about neoliberalism, publishing, and open access. Are you telling me that open access isn’t going to save us from the perils of corporate publishing models?

TG: Right, so, actually that tweet brought a colleague of mine, A.M. Stapp at Pierce College, as well as Joseph M. Gabriel at Florida State University, together to begin to collaborate on this paper in which we’re nearly finished.

Essentially, what we are arguing is that the platform of open-access publishing is actually more of a landscape in which both neoliberal and radical actors are able to interact. We discuss this through the tragic story of hacktivist Aaron Swartz, who was charged in 2011 with 11 violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and 2 counts of wire fraud for downloading millions of documents from JSTOR on his authorized MIT account. Swartz hung himself at the age of 26 rather than face the $1 million in fines and 50 years of imprisonment that the federal government was expected to sentence him with.

In our paper, we ask: why was the U.S. so eager to punish Aaron with such brutality? Aaron’s own justification for downloading those articles was the freedom of information and the open spread of knowledge. We argue that today, there seems to be a dialectic between openness and monopolization emerging within neoliberal discourse—where on one side stands the Old Guard of gatekeepers and on the other side stands Aaron, hacktivism, and open-access culture more broadly. I don’t want to give too much of the paper away yet—since it is a transforming, collaborative project—but what we argue is that the types of forces that Aaron dedicated his life to fighting are now some of the strongest proponents of an open-access model—this is what Nick Srnicek has called “platform capitalism.”

The best examples of this, especially in reference to your question, are academic social networks like Academia.edu and ResearchGate. Both of these corporations present themselves as champions of open-access and the sharing of knowledge, but are actually rather nefarious in the ways in which they monetize the work of scholars for capital gains. In the case of Academia.edu, they even attempt to add legitimacy by using the .edu domain name, when in actuality the company is run by venture capitalists, not by an academic institution. And now, they are offering “premium memberships” in an attempt to further profit off our data and writing.

So this is the complex landscape of open-access. We need to be critical of all these projects rather than expect them to be egalitarian by default just because they endorse an open-access approach—some of those that were eager to see Aaron Swartz imprisoned are now promulgating, and hoping to twist and profit off of, his ideals.

RA: What about viable alternatives? Not just new ideas that sound a little better, but projects that can actually open up new ways of doing this publishing thing. Do you think something like SocArXiv, for example, has the potential to be transformative here?

TG: I think projects like SocArXiv, run by the Open Science Framework—which, I might add, was set up by academic institutions and research librarians, not venture capitalists—is a step in the right direction. The so-called “hard sciences” have been utilizing arXiv to share their research for a long time; and, actually, the scientists that I have spoken to have said that they use arXiv almost exclusively to keep up with research and collaborate with each other—the actual journal articles, which come out months later, are merely used for CV purposes.

In my view, the only way forward with academic publishing is open-access, but it must be an open-access that is controlled democratically. SocArXiv is beginning to do that; their steering committee consists of all academics, although I think they should include adjuncts and graduate students on their committee as well. The next step, I think, is to leverage large academic journals to tear down their paywalls. This task, of course, is enormous and complex. In the meantime, we need to think of ways to collectively use our academic freedom to resist the corporate hold on academic journals and our organizations. We should continue publishing our pre-prints on non-corporate, open-access sites and promote only those preprints which are publically accessible. When possible, we should try to submit more of our research to open-access journals. We should organize and lobby our academic organizations, which are supposed to advocate for us, to battle against the corporatization of publishing.

And on a more important micro scale, we, as anthropologists, should collaborate on projects more. Perhaps this is changing, but anthropologists have tended to approach publishing as a solitary process and single-authored papers/books are the norm. To change the publishing model to something more collaborative and democratic requires a change in the mode in which we approach research itself. We must all become multimodal. We need to legitimize—in the eyes of admission and tenure committees—blogs, social media, drawing, photography, soundscapes, filmmaking. We need to write, to make, to create, to play collaboratively. We also need to become accessible to the public and our participants.

RA: All of this sounds good to me! Including the push for more collaborative writing and publishing. But we’re slow to change. The single-authored book or article reigns. The mathematicians (and other hard scientists) are way ahead of us on this, including how they use platforms like ArXiv. It seems we have call after call of people saying we need to rethink all of this, engage with broader publics, and open up how we publish. But not much happens. One of the biggest challenges, I think, is getting people interested. Is it just apathy? Is publishing a boring issue? Are people just too busy?

TG: Apathy might be part of it, but if I can get a little indignant and provocative, I think a majority of it is connected with cowardice, especially from senior, tenured faculty; and this includes some faculty that claim to be on the side of those disadvantaged by the publishing status quo. I have experienced this first hand in the publishing realm from academics I truly respected and thought were allies who ended up completely turning their backs on junior faculty and/or graduate students in order to side with dominant, abusive power structures and the cronies that latch on to them. I’m sure many have experienced this kind of betrayal and lack of reflexivity throughout the academy. I think David Graeber said it best in his tweet: “Academia is full of people who confuse cowardice and maturity.”

Furthermore, the widespread cowardice in academia must also be viewed in an intersectional manner. These issues are tendril-like—creeping into and intertwining with issues like publishing, working conditions, racism, sexism, continued colonialism, bullying, etc. It’s a problem that requires an engagement with a broader politics, as you say. However, in order to do this, we need to disrupt the system of hierarchy that enables bullies and abusers to rise to positions of power, thereby enabling cowardice to become the status-quo. In general, as the precariat, we need to collectively organize against academia’s corruption and our mistreatment within that system. This call is far from novel: PrecAnthro is doing good transnationalist work, Eli Thorkelson has called for a Union for Job Seekers, secondary education teachers are engaging in wildcat strikes throughout multiple states, and graduate student unions are collectively bargaining and striking against this robust neoliberal cowardice. I believe a uniquely 21st century syndicalism may be forming, thanks in part to social media and virtual solidarity, but only time will tell.

RA: Only time will tell indeed. So what’s your guess? When it comes to all these questions of publishing and precarity, what do you think will happen? Will the status quo just…persist? Or is there actually space for “publishing otherwise,” as Marcel Laflamme once put it?

TG: The status quo will persist, of course…until it doesn’t. What I mean is that we need to hit that critical mass of resistance before change can happen. Publishing otherwise has the potential to create some change, especially if it is articulated as an “exilic space,” but it also possesses the potential to just reinforce the status quo the same way that most reformist rhetoric and action tends to plaster over structural inequalities—the allegorical band-aid over the dismembered limb.

That said, I don’t really believe in forecasting these types of things. I don’t know what will happen. But I do believe we are living in a moment of revolutionary momentum with an unbelievable potential for change. Hunter S. Thompson has a famous quote from Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas where he is lamenting over the perceived failure of social movements in the 1960s. He says: “There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . . And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil […] We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

I think that wave did roll back throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Hunter was right. We experienced neoliberal intensification as “reformers” attempted to stave off capitalism’s impending death by making it not only an economic system, but also a political and social one. Now, I believe, a new wave is beginning to crest and it’s an enormous groundswell of revolutionary potential. All that’s left is for us to collectively catch that wave and shred!

RA: I see what you did there with that optimistic surfing metaphor. Something new may be building; I hope so. Thanks so much for taking the time for this interview, Taylor.

TG: That metaphor was just for you! Thanks, Ryan.

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist.

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For the first time in the history of Visual Anthropology anthropological film can now be published on par with written articles, assessed by peers, and inscribed in international credential systems of academic publication as the Nordic Anthropological Film Association (NAFA) has launched this first edition of Journal of Anthropological Films (JAF) published by Bergen Open Access Publishing (BOAP).

Amazeballs! The announcement that the Nordic Anthropological Film Association (NAFA) had launched the Journal of Anthropological Films (JAF) really blew me away. When I applied for promotion to associate professor (kinda like tenure here in Taiwan, except that we don’t have tenure) I was made to remove all references to an award winning ethnographic film I had made because only publications subject to blind peer review counted for my promotion application. I have since heard of similar stories from visual anthropologists around the globe. There is a deep irony in the fact that our universities employ us to teach ethnographic filmmaking to the next generation of scholars, perhaps even accepting documentaries as part of an MA thesis (as is allowed at my university) but still won’t accept these works in evaluating our own scholarly output. In addition to providing an important open access platform for publishing ethnographic films, hopefully JAF will also help scholars establish the academic value of their work.

The announcement is also interesting for how it handles both definition of “anthropological film” (something I wrote about recently in a series of three posts on the old site):

JAF publishes films that combine documentation with a narrative and aesthetic convention of cinema to communicate an anthropological understanding of a given cultural and social reality. JAF publishes films that stand alone as a complete scientific publication based on research that explore the relationship between “contemporary anthropological understandings of the world, visual and sensory perception, art and aesthetics, and the ways in which aural and visual media may be used to develop and represent those understandings” to borrow words from Paul Henley…

Because of this definition, with its emphasis on “films that stand alone,” most films are presented without text, except in the case that “it adds productively to the anthropological analysis and in case the peer-reviewers will ask for it.” This is an interesting choice, and probably not one I would have made, but I do think it helps establish the idea that films deserve to be taken seriously as academic texts. After all, if every film was accompanied by a written document it might seem like it was the text that was getting reviewed, not the film itself.

I think this is a really exciting development for the discipline and I’m tempted to submit a film for publication just to see what would happen if I included it in my portfolio when I’m ready to apply for full professorship…

Kerim

P. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy. An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, ‘Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!’ about a street theater troupe from one of India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).

kerim.oxus.net/

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Self-archiving, also known as Green Open Access or simply Green OA , is a way for authors to allow at least partial access to their toll-gated work. You might care about this for political or practical reasons, or a combination of the two. As an added kink, depending on your institution or funding agency, you might need to conform to some kind of mandate about participating in Green OA.

Open access allows for people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to access your work to get it. This might be most helpful if you are trying to reach an audience beyond your immediate scholarly community. For example, say you’re producing teaching materials that could be of use in a community college or you’re trying to influence policy in a rural community or you’re in dialogue with other scholars in the global south. Any of these potential stakeholders might want to benefit from your publication but be priced out of access.

Some authors may feel a political or intellectual calling to participate in Green OA. One common theme in Open Access advocacy is framing scholarly publishing a kind of capitalist plunder; that publishers take scholars’ free labor and sell it back to them. In fact scholars do get a great deal of value added out of publishers, so take this with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, it is true that the profit margins of some of the big scholarly publishers are quite high and it is also true that some of the executives of said companies are extravagantly  compensated. Certainly it seems that scholarly publishing is headed towards a crisis as supporting the high costs of journal and database subscriptions crushes university budgets and prices scholars out of doing real scholarship. If you were to throw your hands in the air in exasperation and shout “FUCK ALL THIS NEOLIBERAL BULLSHIT LET’S TAKE THE POWER BACK” then you’d be in some pretty good company. Green OA is free for authors and relatively easy to do, so this is a good way to get in on the ground floor, with or without the expletives.

Recently the AAA sent out take down notices to some authors who shared their works on the social networks ResearchGate and Academia. Ryan Anderson’s post on our old site asks careful and important questions about the AAA’s publishing program and author agreement, and it very helpfully collects many earlier posts from Savage Minds about the changing landscape of academic publishing. If you read it and got something out of it I encourage you to go back and read what he’s linking to as well. In the comments to that piece Alisse Waterson linked to her own post on the AAA blog about archiving and the author agreement. This is also a must read.

Its important to note that posting publications on ResearchGate or Academia is not the same as self archiving and Green OA. Authors participate in these social networks because they feel like they offer a compelling service that enhances their careers. Like hunter-gatherers following optimal foraging patterns, researchers start looking for information in the easiest places first. AAA members with access to more than a century’s worth of material through AnthroSource may eschew that service because they feel it is clunky and unattractive compared to the social networks. In short, ResearchGate and Academia are to some extent beating Wiley in the race to capture users and this is problematic in multiple ways. But more on that in a later post.

Its important to remember who is affected by this take down notice and what its scope is. This notice affects authors in AAA publications, regardless of whether or not they are members of the AAA, and does not extend to works in journals not published by the AAA. Moreover the AAA is not forbidding you from using social media networks such as ResearchGate and Academia, it is reminding authors that they have already agreed to terms that restrict which versions of works can be archived and directing them conform to those terms.

How do I know what I can archive?

Do you know about SHERPA/RoMEO? This valuable online service indexes thousands of publications and publishers in order to provide information about author agreements and open access policies.

For example, this is the entry for American Anthropologist. We can see that the journal offers paid open access (ie., where the author pays a fee to unlock the article for readers). There is a green check next to Author’s Pre-print showing that the work as submitted, before any peer review, may be archived. There is also a green check next to Author’s Post-print showing that the work after peer review can be archived as well. Finally, there is a red X next to Publisher’s Version which indicates that the final product users download cannot be archived.

It is not unusual for some authors to feel like this is not enough information for them to make the right decision about which version of their work to archive. Say, for example, your work has illustrations, photos, charts, graphs, or extended quotations from previously published material — are those your intellectual property or the publisher’s? If you find yourself in this situation it is completely appropriate to pick up the phone and call your publisher. As you might guess, the closer you get to the final product the more restrictive the archiving policy. If you want to err on the side of caution you should go with earlier versions of a piece over later ones.

Below the green checks and red x’s are the journal’s General Conditions about archiving. Here you’ll find that sticky bit about personal websites, institutional websites, discipline-specific repositories, with the caveats that the full citation must be used and the service provider must be non-commercial. We’ll get back to that in a minute. Below this, where it says “Copyright: Policy (pdf)”, is a link to a sample author agreement.

SHERPA/RoMEO can be an invaluable tool if you are an OA advocate or the kind of author who takes a keen interest in reading the fine print. Use this information to compare different journals and publishers against one another so that you can make a strategic decision about what will be in your author agreement. Shop around! If all this seems too extra, well, caveat emptor. You can’t unscramble eggs. As Hunter S. Thompson said, “buy the ticket, take the ride.” Once you sign away your copyright you don’t get it back.

Where should I archive my works?

Not only are there rules about which versions of a work can be archived, there are also rules about who gets to do the archiving. I will go through these point by point and do some combination of explanation and problematizing. I don’t know enough about the history of the AAA’s publishing program to explain how this came to be, so some of the “whys” of the matter will have be left unaddressed.

Whether you are motivated to participate in self-archiving for reasons pragmatic, political, or mandated you want to choose the best possible service. Your publication is your baby and represents an enormous investment in time and energy!

The best option is to use an institutional repository. If you’re at an elite or second tier R1 you probably already have one housed in your university library or, less commonly, in the office of research. You may have one available to you and not even know it! Go ask!

Institutional repositories are the best because they’re run by dedicated professionals who will produce all the necessary metadata and ensure the long term preservation of your bitstream. If you entrust your work to an institutional repository you will have taken the most responsible action, but unfortunately not everyone has that privilege. Some smaller schools and schools that are more hard-pressed financially might not have the resources to run an IR. Independent scholars may be excluded entirely. These are pressing reasons why the AAA ought to revisit these terms.

Disciplinary repositories may, in the near future, completely replace institutional repositories simply because they are more popular among users. Recently the AAA worked to develop a repository in partnership with the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), which was subsequently acquired by mega-publisher Elsevier. Many in academia lamented this episode and forever swore off participating in SSRN for ideological reasons. To them Elsevier and its hard-ball tactics epitomized the corporate enclosure of the university. But in a post on Savage Minds about arXiv and OA business models I argued against this. All OA business models must confront similar problems concerning how to pay for a product that is given away for free, they differ in how they manage to address those problems. Selling out to corporate America is a perfectly legitimate solution. In order to nurture open access we ought to encourage a diversity of problem solving strategies because there is no one, magical solution that works every time.

Some open access advocates do not agree with me, but I think if the open publishing model is going to remain viable we’re going to have to utilize multiple strategies to pay for it. Going corporate is certainly one option and one I believe worthy of serious consideration.

Then we come to the stickiest wicket in the General Conditions for self-archiving, that the service provider be non-commercial. Some will see this as a natural extension of social scientists’ general skepticism towards corporate, for-profit entities. However this is just the AAA acting in its own self-interest. Why should the AAA allow some other entity to profit from the commercialization of its products? The AAA publishes its journals in partnership with Wiley, it cannot consent to archived versions of those publications being on servers owned by Elsevier, Wiley’s competitor.

To make things even more complicated, we can no longer think of institutional repositories as non-commercial. One of the most popular non-open source platforms for university libraries to create institutional repositories is Bepress. After growing in popularity for its ease of use and active community Bepress was acquired by, you guessed it, Elsevier. Moving forward the AAA will have to address this apparent contradiction in its General Conditions.

What about personal websites?

Not long ago creating a personal website was a tinkerer’s hobby that required some knowledge of HTML, CSS, and PHP just to get the thing up and running. Although it is perhaps unfashionable to utter the words “Web 2.0” today, the mid 2000’s really did usher in a tremendous change in the how we use the internet starting with the normalization of user generated content. Not only does it take minimal technical knowledge to create a website, in a sense, every website is now a personal website.

In this light we could think of ResearchGate and Academia profiles as personal websites. Social networks offer their users almost all of the same features to be found in traditional content management systems such as WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, or many others. You, the website creator, cannot claim to own the ingredients that make a website. The domain name, web server, web platform, database, and CMS are essentially leased to you. All you own is your design, visuals, and content. On a stand alone site you own your HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and any custom source code. There are no strong technical differences between personal websites and social media profiles. Perhaps most importantly, personal websites and social media profiles serve the same function.

However you should not think of this as an endorsement of ResearchGate and Academia. Neither ResearchGate or Academia should be relied on for preservation, the longevity of your bitstream is not their concern. This is why its always a better idea to look to institutional repositories or disciplinary repositories for digital archiving. Furthermore, these social networks provide a service free of charge to users because the data users generate is a product to be monetized. If you are using a free service it is because you are the product. Reflect on your participation in these social networks. Is this something you really want to be doing?

The moral of the story

As the fall semester ends and the calendar changes dates let us all take the opportunity to turn over a new leaf with regards to our publishing practices. Like eating local and shopping at small businesses, Green OA offers us the chance to make a big difference just by making up our minds to do it. Aside from the supposed political or ideological benefits of going Green OA, there are many practical benefits including: long term preservation, reaching a broader audience, and conforming to institutional and/or funder mandates. Use SHERPA/RoMEO to decide which versions of your work can be archived and in the future preview publisher policies before you submit your work to them. As far as self-archiving goes, you’re going to get the biggest bang for your buck if you go with an institutional or disciplinary repository, you may have access to one through your university and don’t even know it. Don’t dismiss SSRN, Bepress, or other corporate services out of hand. At the same, think twice about participating in ResearchGate and Academia. Have you read the terms of service? While both of those networks might prove useful to you for other reasons they are not legitimate repositories and are unreliable for long term preservation. If you want to build your own website there are many easy ways to do it, but when it comes to sharing publications, whatever the platform or network, you’ll still have to conform to your publisher’s policies.

Matt Thompson

Matt Thompson is Community Services Librarian for the public library in Suffolk, Virginia. He has a doctorate in anthropology from the University of North Carolina and has been blogging with Anthrodendum née Savage Minds since 2010.

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