I cannot think of a better place to write out my farewell to this community. Writing for anthro{dendum}/Savage Minds has been one of the highlights of my writing career – mostly because it always felt like it was a place I could come, sit, visit, and wonder about the world together with everyone. I started writing for Savage Minds in 2014, and continued with some regularity for quite a bit – until I was diagnosed with cancer in 2019, and then right on its heels, the world shut down as the pandemic took over in 2020. It was not just my world that was unwell, the whole world has not been well, and it has been difficult to wonder about the world together when so much was going wrong. So much more than usual. As I type this, I know that Gaza continues to be bombed: a genocide happening right in front of our eyes.

I sit to have tea with some elders from the village just southwest of MohenjoDaro, we can see some of their homes from the Stupa mound. They tell me about the news, about how many children are dying in Gaza, and they say they have never seen the world so sick and so consumed with money and power to allow children to die at such a scale. I agree with them. They don’t stop talking about it, and I don’t really want them to because it is important to witness the enormity of the atrocities happening in Gaza. The oldest gentleman sitting next to me turns to me and says, when we are asked if we knew, we must say, yes, we all knew. His tears make my throat constrict, and I am unsure of how to respond, except with tears and a nod.

And so we witness, hold, recount, cry, and promise to remember.

Over the past few years, our collective had been talking about whether or not to let go of this space: what feels to me like a comfortable, privileged space of articulation. This blog has created multiple communities, and many of us have been able to engage across our subdisciplines through this mode of writing, certainly in more ways than any academic journal might engender. I had been holding on to this space because I always knew there was a place for me to speak comfortably, where I had a community of writers and readers who understood an anthropological framing. However, a month ago, when the question of sunsetting the blog came up again, I felt like it was important to think more about why it might be the time to do just that. I think about our community of writers, and I think of what the world needs now … and I suspect it isn’t about writing in comfortable anthropological spaces, but rather, it is time for us to move into spaces that make us deeply uncomfortable, where it is difficult, but where it is very necessary for our voices to be heard, for justice to be centered, and where we might elicit change through our words. I’m not sure where that space is, or how I am going to transition into such difficult spaces; wherever it is though, I hope to see some of you there.

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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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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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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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

***

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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