Inaccessible American Anthropology

Alex Golub describes in positive terms the recent announcement, by the main anthropological association in the United States (AAA), that some older articles from a newsletter (AN) and an academic journal (AA) will not require a paid subscription to be downloaded directly.

via Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » AAA ‘goes OA’: The emphasis should be on ‘first step’.

via AAA ‘goes OA’: The emphasis should be on ‘first step’.

Some other links:

• AAA Open Access: Good, but Not “Historic,” Not “Unique,” Not “Among the First” « OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY.
• Open Access or Faux Access? :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education’s Source for News, Views and Jobs.
• American Anthropology Association Tries Out Open Access – Chronicle.com.
• AAA: a little bit Open Access, a little bit closed « Culture Matters.

It’s probably just a knee-jerk reaction on my part but I just don’t see this as a step in the right direction. Sorry.

I can’t help but think that it’s a way to avoid discussions about actual Open Access (OA), not a way to address concerns of the broadest community over the problems related to access to scholarly material. In a discipline which is supposed to care about widespread access, shouldn’t such concerns be taken into careful consideration?

It may sound like a personal preference but I tend to give more credit to pilot projects and other time-limited offers from publishers. As an easy example, the current program advertised by Sage for the month of October.
Some fellow OA enthusiasts and activists have railed against the “trial period” attempts from major publishers (including previous “free access” months by Sage). Their reactions sounded similar to what I’m trying to say about the AAA “OA” plan. But I see those “limited-time free access offers” as more beneficial in an OA logic than the AAA’s “too little, too late” campaign.
One reason I find those publisher offers useful is that these periods during which access to scholarship is made easier usually cover the publisher’s whole database, which makes the benefit of OA much more obvious than having selected issues of selected publications offered at no cost on an association’s semi-obscure website. Someone who’s working on a specific topic could use these trial periods to simply accumulate a lot of material to read later (using Zotero or other tools to keep track of this massive amount of literature). It’s the academic equivalent of binging and it sounds a bit absurd, but it can work (I’ve done this myself, a few years ago; really enjoyed it).
Then, because these major publishers cover several disciplines, those periods during which one can “browse and download at will” really benefit from anthropology’s position at the junction of several disciplines.
There’s an added benefit which is directly in favour of OA: once the trial period is over, individual readers get to notice how sad the current situation of proprietary access really is.

When so much important material suddenly becomes out of reach, people tend to react. And that reaction has some  “marketing” dimensions which are completely absent from the AAA’s scheme. And I’m talking about marketing which would be potentially beneficial to thinking about broad access outside of the tiny box of whether or not university libraries need to pay subscription fees.

To use an awkward analogy… If subscriptions to academic journals were following the same business model as cable or satellite TV providers, these “free access” periods would help convince individual readers of academic journals to subscribe to some kind of monthly plan. A few people who already have site licenses might even elect to subscribe to an individual plan if there’s an added value (say, relevant articles are “pushed” directly to the user when they become available, a step in convenience above the “alerts” some publishers send). But such a plan would be much more valuable to the large number of people who currently don’t have the privilege of having a full and active account in a large university’s library system. This group includes professional academics outside of the academic mainstream as well as non-academics who can greatly benefit from access to academic literature. My hunch is that the number of these non-academics who would like to engage in academic reading is currently growing, partly because of the growing number of university degrees awarded around the world. But even if that number remains stable, this market is currently untapped.
(These kinds of library privileges are really nothing to sneeze at. I’ve heard people use them as one of the most important things to come with a university position. At the same degree of importance if not more than office space. And I find little reason for these privileges to be the prerogative of professional academics at large institutions.)

Of course, I’d much rather have full OA than a “cable TV plan for academia.” But, in a skewed way, the “cable TV” model is closer to true OA spirit than the AAA’s scheme.
Full OA remains a dream but I personally think that this dream can come true during my lifetime (I’m still young). In some contexts, full OA could take the form of publicly-funded access. Something similar to this neat invention that people in the United States call “the public library.” In other contexts, the better-known OA plans (including author-paid) may sound more convincing to people (less “socializing” than the public library concept). And I’m sure some people could devise other schemes which would alleviate access problems to academic texts while maintaining financial viability for at least some of the institutions involved (institutions which, it should be noted, provide very little if any money for such essential academic activities as scholarship and teaching).

So, I perceive those time-limited “free access” offers as an opportunity to get people thinking about OA. And I can’t help but think that the AAA’s press release is more about ending than about opening the discussion on access.
As others have pointed out, these same articles (and a lot more AAA content) are already available on JSTOR.  Now, JSTOR doesn’t have a “send PDF to a friend” button. Nor does it have a specific statement making it clear sending those article files to other people can be perfectly legitimate. (They do talk about U.S. fair use in their Terms and Conditions text but legalese is a bit hard to read for non-native speakers of the legal language). Still, if you think about access in broad terms, JSTOR in general is “accessible” enough that, given a JSTOR-subscribing institution nearby (and African universities have had sponsored licenses), someone could say that the level of access afforded these articles is already pretty decent.
The added benefit of the AAA’s scheme over the current availability on JSTOR (and elsewhere) will need to be assessed carefully. Given the age of these texts, the plan will probably have very limited impact on how frequently these articles are cited (an important OA benefit). Because AnthroSource is AAA-specific, the plan will likely have very limited impact on the visibility of the discipline (another OA benefit). Because of the way AnthroSource is set up, the plan will likely have limited impact in terms of convenience (a minor OA benefit which shouldn’t be forgotten). Unless Google Scholar changes the way it links to those articles, the AAA’s “OA” articles might not be that much easier to find than the other articles. Because only a very limited portion of AAA publications will be covered by the plan, it will probably be confusing to the casual user (“Is it American Ethnologist which is available free of charge? What years, again?”).

Basically, the “OA” plan might only be noticeable to professional academic anthropologists, most of whom already have full AnthroSource access. As we say in French, «un coup d’épée dans l’eau».

So, sorry, but I have no idea why this scheme would be a step in the direction of improved access to anthropological scholarship. My mind can be changed, with thoughtful arguments. It’s just that don’t “get” it at this point.

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The H-Bomb in Open Access to Scholarship

As confirmed in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences has just adopted a groundbreaking mandate “that requires faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles available free online.”

Some coverage elsewhere:

• The Harvard Crimson :: Opinion :: The Case for Open Access
• Harvard faculty considers open access; Tools of Change conference puts publishers on alert – Library Journal
• Optimizing Harvard’s Proposed Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate – Open Access Archivangelism
• Harvard Proposal to Publish Scholarly Research Free on the Internet – New York Times

Peter Suber’s blog is a comprehensive source for Open Access news. Some of his posts covering the Harvard mandate:

• Harvard Faculty Council recommends an OA policy
• More on the imminent OA mandate at Harvard
• Harvard votes yes
• Text of the Harvard policy

Why are those news so important? Well, it’s the first such university mandate in the United States, so it does set a precedent in and of itself. (The UC system might be the second one.) But, of course, Harvard’s prestige is an important factor. Hence the “H-bomb” title: just mentioning “Harvard” has a very strong effect, so much so that some Harvard graduates refrain from mentioning their alma mater. As Suber assesses, Harvard’s support for Open Access makes it unlikely that publishers would refuse articles from Harvard faculty. Personally, I would even go so far as to say that the FUD spewed by “academic” publishers might become much less effective than it has previously been.

In other words, this is a big victory for scholarship. Too bad publishers see it as a defeat. Maybe like “content” lobby groups RIAA and MPAA, publishers will finally be hit by the “cluestick” and will begin to understand that it is, in fact, in their best interest to embrace openness.

Yes, call me naïve.

Open Access in Canada: CIHR Weighs In

This could be big news. Canada’s major health-research agency has announced policy support for Open Access.

Open access to health research publications: CIHR unveils new policy – CIHR

“This open access policy will serve as a model for other funding agencies”

On the other hand, this policy sounds “non-binding”:

CIHR will require its researchers to ensure that their original research articles are freely available online within six months of publication.

grant recipients must make every effort to ensure that their peer-reviewed research articles are freely available as soon as possible after publication

So, it’s not as strong as some other mandates out there. But that might not be such a bad thing either. The benefits of OA are sufficiently clear that the only thing which is needed is that it becomes common practise. If some researchers fail to comply right away, punishing them might not be the most appropriate action. In fact, the way the press release is written, the policy seems to encourage a positive attitude toward OA which sounds quite convincing in the context of Canadian academia.
There have been lots of talk about OA in Canada and elsewhere, but this action by the CIHR can have important consequences.

Personally, and though colleagues surely disagree, I appreciate the fact that “the public” is included in the statement:

As a publicly-funded organization, we have a responsibility to ensure that new advances in health research are available to those who need it and can use it – researchers world-wide, the public and policy makers.

Oh, sure, this doesn’t mean that patients will suddenly be able to use all sorts of information about diseases they may have. We all know about the dangers of self-diagnosis, so that might not be a good thing. The health science literature is difficult enough to understand that chances are that broad readership by the general public may not apply. But the point is made that research (applied or basic) is done for the common good. Not just to get tenure in a university. One thing which might happen, from OA, is that careers in research get started because of access to research documents. Instead of keeping research in the Ivory Tower, research can be more easily distributed to anyone. This can even prevent the spread of disinformation!

For one thing, Open Access to research publications makes a lot of sense in a society which gives so much importance to free access to information. IMHO, the social significance of the Canadian Access to Information Act is often underestimated.

I do hope agencies such as SSHRC will adopt policies similar to the CIHR. Actually the SSHRC has been active in terms of OA, but AFAICT, doesn’t “require its researchers to ensure that their original research articles are freely available online within six months of publication.” OTOH, the SSHRC does have an initiative to support OA journals financially.

Looking forward to what well-known OA advocates will say about this. Surely, they’ll be more critical than I am, saying that this action, on the part of the CIHR, is but one step in the direction of generalised OA.

I may be overly enthusiastic here. But I do think this can be a turning point in Canadian academia.