Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Open Access

2015; Wiley; Volume: 117; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/aman.12231

1548-1433

Michael Chibnik,

Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture

In recent years, increasing numbers of scholarly journals have become "gold open access," in which all content past and present is freely available online. Tom Boellstorff, my predecessor as AA editor-in-chief, advocated in one of his last from-the-editor columns (Boellstorff 2012:389) that the American Anthropological Association (AAA) should "work creatively to make … [their] journals gold open access in a sustainable manner that provides sufficient resources for these publications." When I read this column, I wondered how this would work. Although Tom acknowledged that there would be challenges in "implementing an alternative model to subscription-based financing," he nonetheless said that "anthropologists are a resourceful lot" and saw a need for an expanded discussion of funding possibilities for open access (Boellstorff 2012:391). In my first from-the-editor column (Chibnik 2013), I observed that many potential readers of AA, especially those living outside the United States, lacked access to both recent and older copies of the journal. I briefly noted that there were complex logistical and financial obstacles to providing the entirely open access that many of us would consider desirable. I promised that I would say more about this important topic at unspecified later date. This seems like an opportune time to do so. The prestigious AAA-sponsored journal Cultural Anthropology (CA) is now publishing gold open access. Furthermore, there has been extensive discussion within the AAA about both the financial sustainability of the association's journals and open-access possibilities.1 I now think that gold open access publication is unlikely to be feasible in the near future for AA. The ideas that I present here are mine alone and should not be regarded as reflecting the positions of either the AAA or other editors and staff associated with AA. Proposals to make AA open access must consider ways to keep the journal financially stable while maintaining high-quality peer review, copyediting, proofreading, and manuscript control. AA is currently published in a complex process involving many people, organizations, and funding sources. Although I receive no salary as editor-in-chief, my university provides course relief and an office.2 While the position (which takes about 25 hours of work a week year-round) involves diverse activities, my most important and time-consuming task by far is reading manuscripts and writing decision letters. The journal has a full-time managing editor paid by the AAA who does extensive copyediting, most proofreading, and various other tasks. There is also a part-time editorial assistant (a graduate student in my department) who manages most of the peer-review process. The pay for her position comes from both the AAA and my university. The AAA also provides small amounts of money to editorial staff for travel and supplies. Publishing AA involves large amounts of unpaid labor. Aside from my own work, such labor comes from our editorial board (especially the associate editors), members of the world, visual, and public anthropology teams, the book review section and obituaries editors, manuscript reviewers, and most importantly authors. The publisher of AA and other AAA-sponsored journals is Wiley-Blackwell (WB), a large commercial press. WB does all the production of AA, minor copyediting, and some proofreading. The publisher also performs a host of other AA-related functions including maintaining the journal website, obtaining permissions from authors, providing publicity, and giving technical support to our managing editor and editorial assistant. Through WB, AA is able to use ScholarOne (S1), our manuscript control system. It would be extraordinarily difficult to edit AA without such a system. S1 includes information about manuscripts submitted to AA, keeps track of the peer-review process, has a database of past reviewers, and provides numerous form letters (e.g., requests to review, acknowledgments of receipts of manuscripts and reviews, reminders to reviewers of deadlines) that are either automatically sent or can be activated easily by editorial staff. I do not know all the details of the financial arrangements between AAA and WB. However, it seems clear that most of the money used to produce AA comes from subscriptions to the journal by libraries of universities and other institutions (sometimes including packages with other AAA publications) and dues from AAA members. AA and American Ethnologist (AE) are the only AAA-sponsored journals that make money, with about 75 percent of profits coming from AA and about 25 percent from AE. The American Anthropological Association and Wiley Blackwell share the profits generated by subscriptions to the AAA-sponsored journals. All of these journals except for AA and Anthropology News are affiliated with sections of AAA such as the American Ethnological Society, the Society for Medical Anthropology, and the Society for the Anthropology of Work. AAA redistributes much of the money it receives from WB to these sections via an allocation formula that is periodically revised. The sections use some of the funds they get this way along with member dues to produce their journals. What this means is that the production of most AAA-sponsored journals is supported in part by profits generated by AA (and to a lesser extent AE). Without such revenue sharing, the sections affiliated with these journals would have to raise member dues substantially in order to continue publication. All scholarly journals are being affected by regulations by agencies in the United States and elsewhere that open access be given to publications resulting from their grants. In the United States, the Department of Energy is already doing this. More significantly for anthropologists, it is quite possible that the National Science Foundation will adopt this policy. Such requirements will affect AA and other AAA-sponsored journals in unpredictable ways. The type of open access required is not always "gold"; in some cases, accepted but unedited versions of articles can be used to satisfy the regulation. WB currently allows authors to "ungate" their articles (make them gold open access) if they pay a fee of $3,000. Few authors of AA articles have done this so far, and it is unlikely that many would be willing (or able) to pay such a substantial fee in the future. It is unclear to what extent such regulations will influence AAA to seek less expensive open-access fees in future contracts with publishers. The editors and staff of Cultural Anthropology (CA) have provided a great deal of useful information about their highly publicized experiment in open-access publication (Elfenbein 2014; Kenner 2014; Thompson 2014).3 CA has been able to go open access without significant problems at the outset because of revenue sharing in the past and present between AAA and WB and support provided by the host institutions of the journal's editors. Before CA went open access, the Society for Cultural Anthropology (the journal's sponsoring section) was able to save about $250,000 from the cost-sharing arrangement (including significant amounts from revenues generated by AA) and membership dues. They used about $80,000 of this money to create a website that is essential to their independent publishing.4 CA has never used ScholarOne; instead, the journal works with an open-source manuscript control system (OJS) that receives technical support from the library of Duke University (the institutional home of the journal's coeditors when CA began publishing open access). CA also benefits from wealthy host institutions of its editorial teams (first at Duke University, now at Rice University) that have provided substantial support for the journal. CA currently is operating at a loss each year. Eventually CA will have to find a way to become financially sustainable. This might come from a combination of raised dues, member donations, and institutional support.5 Despite the enthusiasm among many anthropologists for CA's move to open access, their experiment seems to me to be of only limited relevance to AA. AA lacks the elaborate website, accumulated funds, and technical support available to CA. To be sure, AA has the not-insignificant backing of the American Anthropological Association. But for the AAA to commit the financial resources necessary for AA to become open access, dramatic cutbacks would need to be made elsewhere, in particular among the other AAA journals. I cannot disagree with the rhetoric of those advocating open access for American Anthropologist. It would be obviously a good thing if the journal were freely available to readers rich and poor all over the globe. But we live in a world where the economics and logistics of publishing a carefully edited, peer-reviewed journal cannot be ignored.6 Even if a primarily digital AA can continue to count on institutional support and the unpaid efforts of editors and reviewers, money will still be needed for copyediting, proofreading, manuscript processing, and online production. The obstacles to AA becoming open access in the near future may be difficult to overcome. The first four research articles in this issue present anthropological perspectives on complex social, political, and economic issues. Annemarie Samuels examines child-trafficking rumors that circulated after the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean caused extensive damage to parts of Aceh, Indonesia. She focuses on the conditions that led these rumors to acquire affective power. Next Sian Lazar looks at how political demonstrators in Bolivia and Argentina use symbolic "intertextuality" in their efforts to influence government policies. Her general idea is that similarities in the physical and symbolic form of demonstrations at different times and places increase their effectiveness. Cynthia Werner and Holly Barcus show how socially constructed notions about gender and kinship influence the experiences of women migrating from Mongolia to Kazakhstan. Patrilineal descent, clan-based exogamy, and patrilocal marriage result in many women being separated at great distances from their natal kin. Finally, Laurie Medina describes the creation of market-oriented ecotourism in Mopan Maya villages. She examines why the government's neoliberal policies have sometimes led to resistance by villagers whose economic livelihoods have been affected. The remaining three articles in this issue illustrate the diversity of our field. Janusz Wołoszyn and Katarzyna Piwowar discuss how interpretations of sexual acts depicted on Moche pots in South America have changed over time. Their article nicely complements a recent AA article (Nowell and Chang 2014) about sexually oriented interpretations of certain Upper Paleolithic figurines. In a wide-ranging article, Agustín Fuentes argues that our understanding of human evolution can be improved by greater attention to theories about niche construction. Such an approach involves using ideas and materials from different anthropological subfields. In the last research article, Gavin Weston, Jamie Lawson, Mwenza Blell, and John Hayton examine the representation of anthropologists in 51 movies featuring characters described specifically as anthropologists. They find that anthropologists often appear in horror films where their role is to provide intercultural or interspecies expertise. In films in which anthropologists appear, the supposed savagery of the "other" is often used in a way to critique the savagery of Western capitalist modernity. Since 2009, the June issue of AA has included essays reviewing the previous year in different subfields of anthropology. This issue continues this new tradition with review essays on archaeology, biological anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. Review essays on sociocultural anthropology and public anthropology will appear this year in later issues. The World Anthropology section begins with an overview of East Asian anthropology by Gordon Mathews. Despite considerable support for anthropology in the region, Mathews says that "East Asia is not yet ready to assume the mantle of being a center of global anthropology." Mathews's essay is followed by comments by Shu-min Huang, Thomas Reuter, Helen Siu, Shinji Yamashita, and Judith Farquhar. The section also includes an interview by Virginia Dominguez with Goh Beng Lan from the National University of Singapore focusing on anthropology in Southeast Asia. In the first essay in the Public Anthropology section, Christen Smith discusses anthropological perspectives on an emerging "global politics of race, citizenship, violence, and nation." She frames her comments in the context of political protests by black people in the United States and Brazil. The multiply authored second essay in the section begins with an overview of past and present efforts to increase the proportion of underrepresented minorities in anthropology in the United States. The authors then describe in detail the efforts by the anthropology department at the University of South Florida to address diversity issues. In her review essay that begins the Visual Anthropology section, Laliv Melamed discusses Ford Transit and two other films (The Lab, Al Jaar Quabla al Daar/The Neighbor Before the House) about Israel–Palestine. Amahl Bishara also reviews Ford Transit. She describes the film as "both … a record of one moment in the always-adjusting regime of Israeli colonialism and also a meditation on Palestinian humor, endurance, and expression under severe restriction." Appearing next is a review of Larisa Kurtovic's Tito on Ice, a documentary about two Swedish cartoonists who travel to the former Yugoslavia with life-size dummy of Marshal Tito. The last piece in the section is Jessie Weaver Shipley's extended photo essay on selfies. The range of topics covered by the books reviewed in this issue is, as always, extraordinary. The 32 reviews include books about sex work in India, brass bands in New Orleans, cultural dimensions of ecotourism, archaeology in the Inca heartland of Peru, the translation of Maya hieroglyphics, and ways in which scientists study Native American DNA. I thank Tim Elfenbein for providing extensive useful information in a conversation about open access at Cultural Anthropology.