Tag Archives: Open Access

#OA at #AAA2014: What do we talk about when we talk about Open Access?

 

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(Note:  this is one of two posts I wrote this week about Open Access publishing.  You can read the other one here at the EPIC people blog).

I spent nearly all of my time at #AAA2014 this year talking and thinking about libraries, publishing, open access (OA), and anthropology.  The crowd with which I was talking included anthropologists, of course, but also librarians, publishers, and hybrid people who were a little bit of all three categories.    Informal conversations in the book room (the lovely oasis in the middle of the conference-hotel-chaos) were a prelude to my attendance at the Friday morning session on open access publishing in anthropology (one of the SCA-sponsored events listed here).   The panelists presented a variety of perspectives on open access, some nuts-and-bolts type “you need to be able to deal with funding/curation/discovery” discussions, and some much more theoretical “what does publishing mean” and “what would an open-practice (not just an open-access) anthropology look like?”

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You can see from my tweets that I fairly quickly disagreed with the framing of part of the problem of OA–da Col is problematizing an approach to OA publishing that frames it within a gift economy, but in my experience the process of publishing scholarly communications is firmly perceived within the market–by publishers, and by scholars.  Scholars are in the market of exchanging their publications for academic success.  Publishers are in the business of selling scholarship back to the very scholars who produce the content.  I wonder if there is some conflation between the prevalent “The Internet is Free” narrative that libraries often have to encounter in justifying their existence within higher ed, with the “Content should be accessible” narrative that is more vividly shot through discourses around OA publishing.  I was especially frustrated at this approach from da Col, whose experiences with HAU as an OA publication seem to be an excellent model for some.  I would have liked to have heard more about the actual transformations of scholarly practice possible within the existing innovations at HAU.

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This came up a lot, the “self-publishing” phrase, and perhaps it’s shorthand for “not-by-publishers” publishing, but I think it’s potentially dangerous to talk about OA this way, because it communicates to scholars that they need to DIY themselves through open access.  When what they actually should be doing is collaborating with people in libraries and publishing who are already engaging in open access practices (e.g.:  Duke, University of Chicago press, HAU, etc. etc.).  Cultural Anthropology, and in particular Tim Elfenbein, have offered themselves and what they have learned from their experiences so far.  I think what frustrated me most about the tone of the SCA panel on OA was its cautious negativity.  “This is hard.”  “We didn’t think of this”   When it’s clearly do-able, even with challenges.

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At the same time that everyone in the room seemed to agree that it is important to figure out how to get to OA.  

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I particularly appreciated the perspective of Jessica Cattelino, outgoing SCA treasurer, who even as she detailed some of the financial nitty-gritty behind open access, opened the discussion up to a consideration of what might be possible once more of us engage in these kinds of publishing practices.

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This was another theme that came up again and again–publishing is a particular kind of expertise, and scholars in anthropology (and other disciplines) don’t necessarily have it.  The solution, to me, is not to insist that anthropologists become publishers, but rather to point to opportunities to collaborate with people who have the necessary expertise (again:  librarians and publishers).

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Even with the optimistic talk about what an open-practice open-access anthropology might look like, the SCA panel left me with an overwhelming sense of the anxiety that academics carry into conversations about OA publishing.  And, no wonder–academics in all fields perceive traditional publishing as what they exchange for their success in academia.  But some of the anxiety stems, surely, in part from the fact that one can publish in academia, in high impact journals, and still not have full time (let alone tenure-track) academic work.

In the Global Social Media panel, Danny Miller’s team of ethnographers presented on their (very cool) work on social media practices around the world, and made the point of saying that the outputs of their research were all going to be CC-licensed OA materials, and not just in text format.  

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This is a high-viz, well-funded anthropology project, and its unconventional approach to communicating their research results (scholarly and otherwise) could serve as another model for what it looks like to be OA in our discipline.

The need to be OA resonated nicely with the theme of the Popular Anthropology “Installation” on Friday afternoon, where a panel of anthropologists discussed, among other things, the persistent need for anthropologists and anthropological thinking to reach wider audiences.  OA is going to be a crucial tool in this.  We need to have more engagement with the public, not less, and in particular need to not play status games with those in our field who are particularly good at popularizing anthropology.   And we should make it clear that anthropological voices can and should be relevant, should speak to concerns of people outside of anthropology, not limit themselves to speaking in closed disciplinary circles.  Anthropological voices, with a few exceptions, are largely missing from national conversations around education, health, politics, race, and a whole range of structural inequalities.  We cannot sit back and expect that to change just because we have something to say.  We need to take our contributions to the public, engage with them, make ourselves visible.

I was so pleased with our roundtable discussion on Saturday morning, “Anthropological Knowledge: Access, Creation, and Dissemination in the Digital Age”  My colleague Juliann Couture co-organized this panel along with Richard Freeman–both of them are librarians, and the tone of the discussion in our roundtable contrasted remarkably with that of the SCA, in part because there were so many people in our room (even though it was a smaller crowd) who actually knew how OA could be (and was being) done, not just at Cultural Anthropology, but across the discipline, and even outside of it.  

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Matt Thompson blogs for Savage Minds.   The list Matt has complied of current OA journals in anthropology is a valuable tool, for those interested in current practices, and for the journals themselves, to be able to identify important holes in how they are doing OA, and where they need to improve what they are doing to maximize access and discovery.  Also in the room with us on the panel was Tim Elfenbein, who by now is one of the most experienced OA publishers in Anthropology (along with the gang at HAU).

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It is frustrating for me to witness anthropologists, who complain mightily when people outside of our discipline assume that our methods and theoretical approaches are intuitive, easy, and unproblematically acquired, do the same thing about other professions.  There are entire professions out there (I repeat myself for a reason:  LIBRARIANS AND PUBLISHERS) who can be partners with us in OA.  We need to reach out to and collaborate with them.  SCA already is with Duke Libraries  HAU already is with the University of Chicago. We have OA policies and journals at UNC Charlotte.   These and others can be models for the smaller society sections worried about how to do this and what would it look like, and will they lose their identity?  I think an argument can and should be made to the smaller society sections that the content of their journals, once they are converted to OA, can be more visible than now, to the greater good of their community of scholars and to the people who now have access to it.

Because it’s not just about being “accessible,” as anyone who works in libraries and publishing can tell you, it’s about being “discoverable,” and that’s a whole ‘nother thing.  

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Other fields can help.  There are models out there.

 

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Because when we talk about OA publishing, we are not just talking about OA publishing.

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Notes:

Our panel abstract here, for those who can’t get into the (#ironyclaxon) AAA proceedings:

As information technologies have lowered barriers to content generation and user participation, anthropologists using digital means of transmission and communication have encountered a slate of challenges and opportunities. Traditional practices for the creation and dissemination of new knowledge are in a state of flux, transforming and shifting how anthropology research is produced, measured, and accessed. Rapid growth of Open Access (OA) journals, institutional and federal mandates, and sites for sharing academic work are coupled with confusion surrounding ownership and author’s rights. Researchers must navigate the new landscape to facilitate the communication of new knowledge, satisfy funding mandates, and leverage new venues to share research data with collaborators and communities. This roundtable will bring together scholars and practitioners to discuss these issues of access, ownership, copyright, production, and dissemination and what this means for the future of anthropological research. A variety of OA projects will be explored to expand the conversation beyond the author-pays model. OA publication and the social life of documents on the web raise practical and technical issues as readily as they reveal digital divides of unequal participation and representation. Negotiating of the agreement between author and publisher can increase access to anthropology research published in toll-access journals through the use of disciplinary and institutional repositories. We will discuss common publishing agreements and steps authors can take to negotiate their right to deposit in a repository and their right to make their work more widely available especially as publishers such as Elsevier have become more aggressive in policing how published work is shared. New modes of disseminating anthropology research allow one’s research to be widely available, beyond sharing drafts of papers or completed articles. It is a new way to share fieldnotes, data, videos, images, and audio recordings. This data sharing can expand collaboration opportunities with other anthropologists and students while creating digital collections and opportunities to communicate in formats beyond the traditional journal article or book format. As our methods of publishing and disseminating anthropological research shift, so do the ways in which we measure the impact of that research. Options beyond the traditional journal impact factor and citation counts will be explored including article level metrics, altmetrics, and how these new venues affect one’s publication record.

This session would be of particular interest to:
Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Students, Those involved in mentoring activities

Organizers:  Juliann Couture (University of Colorado Boulder) and Richard B Freeman (University of Florida)
Chairs:  Donna Lanclos (J. Murrey Atkins Library, UNC Charlotte)
Roundtable Presenters:  Richard B Freeman (University of Florida), Matthew D Thompson (Old Dominion Univeristy), Timothy W Elfenbein (Society for Cultural Anthropology) and Juliann Couture (University of Colorado Boulder)

AAA 2013, Anthropology and Open Access

Just back from the American Anthropological Meetings in Chicago and I am so amazingly glad I went.  Library and IT conferences are a part of my professional rounds these days, but there is something so comforting about being surrounded by friends and colleagues to whom I don’t have to explain myself.  We can just have conversations (so many conversations!) starting off from our common ground as anthropologists.  It’s such a freeing feeling.  I am already looking forward to being in DC for AAA2014.

I was particularly energized by the panels I went to, and I will talk about the second one more in part because it was such a surprise to me.  When I saw the title, “The Future of Writing and Reading in The Digital and Open Access Eras,” I was worried, because much of what I’d been hearing about Open Access from my colleagues in anthropology was full of worry and pessimism, not to mention themes that appeared to be straight out of some publishers’ handbooks.  I had a pre-panel chat with my colleague Juliann Couture, who is the ACRL liaison to the AAAs as well as social science librarian at the University of  Colorado, Boulder.  We went over all of the things that we wished the panel would be about (but were afraid it would not be).  And then we went to the panel, and Tom Boellstorff from UC Irvine got up and said everything we had wished for.  I live-tweeted it.  I wanted to stand up at the end of his part of the panel and shout AMEN.

I have an #OA crush on Tom Boellstorff .  Just going to say DITTO and WHAT HE SAID #AAA2013
— Donna Lanclos (@DonnaLanclos) November 23, 2013

RT @DonnaLanclos: Tom Boellstorff appalled at level of ignorance among #anthros about #OA (I am, too!) #AAA2013
— Donna Lanclos (@DonnaLanclos) November 25, 2013

Issues: political economy, genre, authorship and collaboration, peer review, assessment, access and social engagement #OA #AAA2013
— Donna Lanclos (@DonnaLanclos) November 23, 2013

Can have:  not digital not #OA, not digital yes #OA, yes digital not #OA, yes digital yes #OA #AAA2013
— Donna Lanclos (@DonnaLanclos) November 23, 2013

Online journals are not “just blogs”–still take resources and $$ and labor #OA #AAA2013
— Donna Lanclos (@DonnaLanclos) November 23, 2013

make sure people know difference among Green #OA, Gold #OA (he prefers the latter), need to think about paying for it #AAA2013
— Donna Lanclos (@DonnaLanclos) November 23, 2013

A lot of book publishers don’t care if the dissertation is #OA, they know the book MS is different #AAA2013
— Donna Lanclos (@DonnaLanclos) November 23, 2013

#OA can be an important part of making sure that #anthro knowledge is public #AAA2013  #Amen
— Donna Lanclos (@DonnaLanclos) November 23, 2013

Need to think about how we assess value, how emergent models of evaluation are generated by new tech, forms #OA #AAA2013
— Donna Lanclos (@DonnaLanclos) November 23, 2013

Trust, Value, Authority, are related and different and are increasingly situated in individuals not institutions #OA #AAA2013 @daveowhite
— Donna Lanclos (@DonnaLanclos) November 23, 2013

The above tweet gets at some of what we are starting to talk about in the Visitors and Residents  project, how online forms of communication, scholarly production, and community have the potential to fundamentally transform notions of where scholarly authority, trust, and value lie.  Where before it has been associated with institutions such as universities and publishers, altmetrics and social media give us the possibility of individuals as their own authoritative selves, independent of institutions.

Life histories of MS are now much more complicated.  Afterlife of article is more important than ever.  No final version. #OA #AAA2013
— Donna Lanclos (@DonnaLanclos) November 23, 2013

The subsequent speakers were equally thoughtful, if a bit more cautious about some aspects of OA.  The fact that Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and  Giovanni Da Col are in university contexts outside of the US contributed a great deal to the critical eye they brought to the peculiarly market-driven narrative around OA in the US, and how problematic that is.

What happens to academic freedom when universities submit themselves to capitalist needs? #OA #AAA2013
— Donna Lanclos (@DonnaLanclos) November 23, 2013

Discussant Alisse Waterston highlighted the questions that needed to be answered about OA for academic publishing and the production of other forms of scholarship, but also made the point that

There are multple audiences for #anthro knowledge, our publishing strategies should shift to reach them #AAA2013 #OA
— Donna Lanclos (@DonnaLanclos) November 23, 2013

During the discussion Juliann and I both pointed out the role that university libraries are playing in the OA discussion, and that some of the models that anthropologists and other scholars are searching for could be found collaboratively, working with people in other fields (such as Biology, which has a robust OA scholarly presence, as well as Library and Information Science), as well as elsewhere on their own campuses.

There are structural solutions to the concerns about equity in an #OA model of publishing.  Libraries can be partners in solutions #AAA2013
— Donna Lanclos (@DonnaLanclos) November 23, 2013

@DonnaLanclos but challenge is trying to support OA while unis & libraries are still paying outrageous $$$ for trad scholarship. #aaa2013
— Juliann Couture (@julezig) November 23, 2013

And the managing editor of Cultural Anthropology, Tim Elfenbein, contributed his thoughts from his experience in trying to figure out what OA might look like, and the energy required to think not just about publishing, but broadly about scholarship.

Need to talk about scholarhip as a commodity sometimes and as a gift at others @culanth #AAA2013 #OA
— Donna Lanclos (@DonnaLanclos) November 23, 2013

This circles back around to the idea broached in the early parts of the panel by Boellstorff, that new forms of scholarly production, including OA forms, do not mean the death of the article or of the book (I wonder if it might mean the death of the journal, as we know it).  These are not mutually exclusive forms, they can co-exist and work within a more rich, complex system of scholarship.

The point about the need for us to be open and transparent in our scholarship, not just to our colleagues, but to the people among whom we do our research, is also crucial.  OA is an important tool to use in our project of making anthropological knowledge accessible to wider publics, not just the public of our fellow anthropologists, or even just other academics.

The potential OA has to transform the processes of scholarship, to make clear how people write, and what is involved in creating manuscripts for books, articles, even blogposts and other experimental writing genres, is so exciting to me.  All of my work, now that I am in an academic library, is collaborative, and I have no choice but to share awful rough drafts with my collaborators.  It is liberating and satisfying to take nascent ideas, and really work with people from the first word to get our collective ideas shaped and temporarily fixed into what we want to say.  There will always be a time and a place for working alone, but working with other scholars is, I think, the best opportunity for truly new things to arise.

Open Access, AAA and the dilemma of scholarly communication in a digital world

So, this is happening, and lots of organizations are replying to the Request for Information (RFI, if you need an acronym) from the federal Office of Science and Technology Policy.  My own professional organization, the American Anthropological Association, submitted this reply, and it is being widely interpreted by vocal members of the discipline as towing the publishing industry’s rather conservative and print-journal-centric line about Open Access, and other less centralized models of scholarly publication and communication.

I do think it’s a conservative reply, and I don’t really agree with the principles embedded in the letter.  I think that the publisher-defined peer-review major-journal model of academic publications is one that doesn’t necessarily serve scholars particularly well anymore.  I think that some academic publishers are engaging in behavior that results in less access to scholarship rather than more (see, for instance:  Elsevier), and that there are increasing numbers of alternate models out there that we could begin to look at as a discipline (some are coming from our own subdisciplines).  I also think that we are not the only discipline struggling with trying to balance the needs of many of our members for tenure-and-review-worthy academic work (which is still largely defined as “publishing in major peer-reviewed journals, and/or publishing your work as a monograph with a major academic press”).   The folks talking about Digital Humanities are among those who are actively dismantling the traditional system with an eye to something very new, vibrant, and still rigorous and scholarly (not to mention, fun).

I encourage those of you interested in this to really mine the responses to the RFI.  I’m at a UNC, so I’m not supposed to say this, but I think that the response from the Duke University Libraries is an especially good one.  It strikes me as constructive not just because I agree with its stance on OA (pro), but because it’s clearly written by people (librarians!) who have an idea of what kind of information structures would allow us to get there.  And by “there,” I don’t necessarily mean an exclusively OA model.  Perhaps there will still be a place for journals in the future of scholarly communication.  But I think that the way forward can’t actually be thought up by asking anyone (including AAA membership), “What do you want the future of scholarly publishing to look like?”  Because you can’t know what you don’t know.

When, in the course of my work, I ask students flat questions like “What do you want from the library?”  they  often ask for more efficient or more numerous examples of the same kinds of things we provide for them.  They are not information or academic professionals, they don’t know what all is possible.  It’s actually more effective for us to look at the kinds of things they are doing inside and outside of the library, and think creatively then about how we might meet those needs.  Thinking creatively means consulting and collaborating with a variety of people, not just in the library, but in educational practice, in academic disciplines, in administration, in architecture and design.

AAA just finished a long journey towards a new code of Ethics, and presented it at our annual meetings last Fall.   To do this, they gathered a committee of a variety of different anthropological practitioners, and they started not by asking “what do you want in a code of ethics,” but, “what do you do to practice anthropology ethically?”  By starting (anthropologically) from a place grounded in actual practices, they could work towards a code that reflected the lived reality of anthropologists on the ground.

I think that something similar might be done with a publishing model.  How are anthropologists getting information about their field now?  What does that look like?  What kinds of scholarly communications are they producing?  What forms does that communication take, how are they disseminating the information and analysis they produce?  What parts are digital?  Which are analog?  How much takes place in face-to-face interactions?  Why?

In short, we need to be anthropological about it.  And we also should not let the request for information in two weeks badger us as an organization into producing a statement that might fall short of representing a perspective that reflects the priorities of our membership.  If we need more time to figure things out, we should say so.  If we’re leery of mandates in the form of federal instructions about OA, we should say so.  But we should also be open to possibilities.  And we can be most open if we are anthropological in our approach.

Get out there and figure stuff out.  And also:  collaborate with libraries.  They really do know what they are doing.