2. The intensity of the battle is illustrated by the PRISM controversy and publisher opposition to the NIH mandate. The Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM) is a lobbying organization founded by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which included several member presses (both commercial and university). According to its website, PRISM “was formed to advocate for policies that ensure the quality, integrity, and economic viability of peer-reviewed journals” (http://www.prismcoalition.org/, accessed March 22, 2008). PRISM's strategy was to describe Open Access as a threat to (or mutually exclusive of) peer review and to resist the NIH's attempts to mandate open access to federally funded research and specifically to the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). Many people outside commercial publishing circles saw PRISM as a propaganda effort, a classic Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) campaign. The AAA signed up as a member of the AAP much to many people's dismay. Indeed, there is a widespread view that the original AnthroSource Committees were disbanded because they supported the NIH and FRPAA legislation while the Executive Board and/or the Association's staff did not. The AAA sought to clarify, in a widely circulated FAQ document, why it joined the AAP in opposing the FRPAA and went to great lengths to indicate that this should not be seen by the membership as general opposition to open access. However, both the AAA's decision and the PRISM “scorched-earth” campaign have polarized the OA debates and made them more combative. PRISM largely backfired and it led to high-profile conflicts within the AAP, as when it was disavowed very dramatically by the directors of various university-based AAP presses and many scholars who had previously adopted a relatively cautious approach to such things as open access, author's rights, and change in scholarly publishing were radicalized by the blatant propaganda techniques deployed by PRISM and the AAP leadership. Peter Suber's website contains almost every relevant source (search on PRISM) on the controversy (see http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html, accessed March 22, 2008). For the official AAA FAQ explaining opposition to the NIH Bill, see http://www.aaanet.org/press/FRPAA.htm, accessed May 6, 2008. For the now-disbanded AnthroSource Steering Committee's statement in favor of the NIH Bill see, http://www.aaanet.org/press/ASSCletter.htm, accessed May 6, 2008. For a detailed case against the PRISM/AAP position, see http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/09-02-07.htm#peerreview, accessed May 6, 2008.

3. The Coke Complex project (http://culanth.org/cokecomplex/) was designed to make the materials more widely available to drive attention to a timely and politically fraught issue. Bob Foster has published an article in Anthropology News explaining how to teach with this series of articles: http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/an.2008.49.4.38

4. Michael Jensen published a nice list of such possible metrics at http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i41/41b00601.htm, accessed May 6, 2008.

5. Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to mandate this process. See this article about OA repositories: http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/371-Open-Access-Koans-Mantras-and-Mandates.htm, accessed May 6, 2008.

6. SPARC (http://www.arl.org/sparc/), HASTAC (http://www.hastac.org), RoMEO (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php), and The Center for History and New Media at George Mason (http://chnm.gmu.edu/), or the Institute for the Future of the Book (http://www.futureofthebook.org).

7. Information on the committee, its members, and its work can be found at http://www.aaanet.org/cmtes/CFPEP.cfm, accessed May 6, 2008.

8. See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/business/media/11harper.html?ex=1203397200&en=b0a2eff8616ea553&ei=5070&emc=eta1, accessed May 6, 2008.

9. See http://www.williams.edu/go/native/, accessed May 6, 2008.

10. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

11. On gold, green, and other terms see Peter Suber's Open Access Overview, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm, accessed March 22, 2008, and the description of the color coding of the RoMEO project on which this distinction is based, http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeoinfo.html#colours, accessed March 22, 2008. Creative Commons provides tools by which authors and creators can change the copyright terms they attach to their works, thereby permitting uses that would not be possible under standard forms of copyright. See: http://creativecommons.org/, accessed March 22, 2008.

12. For those interested in alternative tools available for starting an open access journal, there are three important technologies to date: Open Journal Systems, provided by the Public Knowledge Project: at Simon Frasier University, http://pkp.sfu.ca/, accessed March 22, 2008. Of special interest is the sample list of journals already using OJS, see: http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs-journals, accessed March 22, 2008. The institutional repository software D-Space (http://www.dspace.org) is an open-source on-line archive tool provided by MIT; it does not require that materials be made open access, but allows that option. Eprints, by contrast, is a repository software project devoted to fostering open access to its contents (http://www.eprints.org).

Editor's Note: Cultural Anthropology has published several essays on the practices and cultures of academic publishing, including George Marcus's “American Academic Journal Editing in the Great Bourgeois Cultural Revolution of Late 20th-Century Postmodernity: The Case of Cultural Anthropology” (1991), Alan Howard's “Hypermedia and the Future of Ethnography” (1988), and Corinne Kratz's “On Telling/Selling a Book by Its Cover” (1994).

Cultural Anthropology has also published a range of essays on alternative, emergent, and moral economies, including Mark Liechty's “Carnal Economies: The Commodification of Food and Sex in Kathmandu” (2005), Ann Russ's “Love's Labor Paid For: Gift and Commodity at the Threshold of Death” (2005), and Benjamin Orlove's “Meat and Strength: The Moral Economy of a Chilean Food Riot” (1997).

CK: The obvious transformations that might apply to Two Bits concern things like translations, abridgments, use in classrooms, transformation into other formats (as long as they are noncommercial and not in competition with the Duke version). Most scholarly books are not candidates for translation, for instance, simply because it is expensive to do it right—finding a good translator and brokering deals with other presses in other countries. Here, once again, the success of Free Software is interesting. One of the most common volunteer tasks in Free Software is translation of the software, its interface and its documentation. This doesn't necessarily produce the best versions, and can result in plenty of gaffes, but its certainly better than nothing. I'd be happy if my book were partially translated, even poorly, than that it remain totally inaccessible. One reason I'm not worried is that such transformations are always nonexclusive and provisional. If I find someone who can do a better job, or if someone volunteers, then we can improve it. It's an interesting question for anthropologists especially. What if you had the choice between professional translation into the major languages (French, Spanish, German, maybe Chinese or Japanese), and volunteer translation into tens, maybe hundreds of languages? What would you choose?

MMJF: So this goes beyond just questions of access to questions of potential collaboration and community amongst readers of our scholarship. Who is going to participate and why?

CK: I think this very much depends on the nature of the project, the scholars, and the nature of the objects and processes that people are analyzing. Speaking for myself, Two Bits could be an opportunity to constitute a community of scholars around the topics and arguments of the book (the history and meaning of Free Software, and the role of public domains and public spheres). I want people who find my book on-line to find not only a book, but a whole research agenda, a discussion, a networked set of arguments and counterarguments that might develop based on who is reading the book and what they might want to say. I think journals play this role, along with book reviews, conference proceedings, and other kinds of documents that come from scholarly interaction as we have known it. But they are no longer the only mechanism of scholarly interactivity: There is a whole ecology of flexible new distribution and interaction channels. These channels are also less stable, less permanent, and less coordinated, and so it will require work to produce that kind of stability, and I think university presses, scholarly societies and libraries can provide that stability and legitimacy. Adrian Johns book The Nature of the Book very nicely captured just how hard this work was the first time around.¹⁰

MMJF: Can you say a bit more about the digital ecologies here: the work done for stabilization and legitimacy as Internet experiments unfold? I'm thinking also of Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler's experiments with their books. Another example would be the work done by the editors here at Cultural Anthropology itself to create a more dynamic website that displays and organizes the articles of CA in new ways. This could be useful for teaching, but also for new authors submitting to CA. One of the problems of free-standing journals is that submissions come as if no one had read what the journal had published before, rather than what I think of as the shared communities (Malinowski's seminar, Boas' seminar, and so on) where students were taught to do detailed reanalyses of published materials. That tradition of reanalysis of new and old material has atrophied. Are blogs the answer? How can we turn superficial and dispersed blogs into must read venues for scholarship?

CK: Benkler and Lessig's projects illustrate well the diversity of the possible new modes. This isn't just about putting books on-line, making them free, or “wikifying” them. There are open questions about the process, the distribution of credit, the ecology of possible uses, and the revenue structure of all of these things. Lessig's experiment was in some ways the kind of “reanalysis” you are pointing to, but around an issue of advocacy primarily, not scholarship. He encouraged people to help rewrite his book Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace because it needed to respond to rapidly changing legal and technical issues. The volunteers were organized by Lessig, but free to take his work in another direction if they so chose. Similarly, Benkler's experiment aimed to open up his book (The Wealth of Networks) to all potential reuses and derivative works, partially as a way to test his own claims about “peer production.” But it wasn't a huge success. On the one hand, academics are extremely suspicious of such a project precisely because we are so obsessed with credit. On the other hand, nonacademics might not see value in the process because it doesn't allow one to “break into” academia—it's still Benkler's book, no matter what you do with it.

Cultural Anthropology is in fact at the right scale and right middle distance to make such projects a success. But I think this discussion makes clear that editors are neither being asked to innovate, nor are they in any position to do so. All the ideas CA has had (about trying to jump-start new modes of engagement with topical areas and producing more longitudinal connections across issues, and creating a public advisory board) are good ones—and there is plenty of technology to facilitate them all—but they come from the bottom up and gain no traction within the AAA or WB. Academics desperately need ways to transform what they are doing every day into contributions that go beyond the single, uncontextualized contribution to a journal. That tradition of rereading and deepening you mention hasn't disappeared—but the world has changed around it such that “Malinowski's seminar” is no longer a seminar at the London School of Economics, but a global debate that no one knows quite how to manage yet. What we lack is a correlative to “Malinowski's seminar” that isn't just another department, but something that can lend legitimacy and hopefully pool some resources across all our distributed locales. If we continue to work in the ways we have we will live in a world of “publish AND perish.” We spend massive amount of time meeting the demands to publish, and when we do, our work disappears into a black hole—inaccessible, unread, and unconnected to any other works that might be in dialogue with it.

MMJF: The more this discussion progresses the more it sounds like revolution is actually the right course—should we be creating new associations? We all put a lot of time into journal work, writing, reviewing, resubmits, second round reviewing, sourcing images, etc. Why not put that work into our own, peer-reviewed, sponsored by SCA or its spin-off? If the major anthropology departments agreed to count that work for tenure would that not be a start? What else could we or the SCA do to move beyond the current state of affairs?

CK: Well in a way, I can't answer this without sounding self-aggrandizing: more people should be doing what all of us here do. More authors, especially senior authors who can take the risk, should be urging their presses and journals to open access their articles, or threaten to take them to places that will. As Kim and Tom suggest, there are all kinds of solutions, a range of possible meanings for open access, so it needn't be an all or nothing deal. As this video [http://blip.tv/file/743274, accessed May 6, 2008] and the SPARC Author Addendum [http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/addendum.shtml, accessed May 6, 2008] make clear: retain the rights you need. If you want to be able to post your article on a website, deposit it in a respository, or email it to your students and colleagues, you can keep that right. Publishers only need the right to publish the article, not all rights. There are open source tools for creating your own journal as well, but there is a lot of visible and invisible labor in doing so, which means that any move toward a new association will require money, staff and time.

KC: Perhaps the SCA could make it their role to promote and help strategize about open access solutions? This journal has started a “public advisory board,” which is intended to get anthropological research out to the people beyond the academy who might need it or use it or benefit from it. Most authors would want their works available to their “source communities” and even if you don't, there are people other than AAA members, or members of elite universities who might want to read it.

CK: The sections could also start making the case that the accounting needs to change. We should be paying to publish research, not to purchase it. Ideally, I don't want anyone to have to pay to get their research published—but it costs money to do research, full stop. Whether that money comes from the government, your university, a grant, a foundation, or a trust fund, part of the accounting should be the costs of peer review, revision, and publication of an article. Anthropologists should be urging their department chairs, deans, university counsel, faculty senates and councils, funders and everyone else in the ecology of the university system to rethink how they account for the costs of research—to focus on the up-front costs of research and to include in that the costs of publication, promotion and archiving, rather than living in fantasy world in which costs are covered by selling the research. This is better for funders as well, because it forces academics to more precisely predict the potential output of a research project, and to be held accountable for what is or is not published as a result. Scholars and librarians have common cause here, because libraries should be the natural leaders in the dissemination of a university's research—but they certainly aren't going to do so if they are paying $15,000 per subscription to buy the research that their faculty members produce, as Jason has made abundantly clear already.

JJ: In some ways, I can imagine new kinds of problems (perhaps exciting, perhaps threatening) that would emerge out of the success of Open Access. Given the diversity of Open Access possibilities (“gold OA” journals that are predicated on subsidies or shoestrings, large scale “author-pays” operations, “green OA” and “institutional repositories,” all the different versions of Creative Commons licenses, and so on), there could be a chaotic proliferation of different solutions—by university, by discipline, by nation?¹¹ Are we risking a kind of anarchy here? Are there any lessons from the success of Free Software that might help us grapple with the state of scholarly communications?

CK: Absolutely, and this goes back to the Rex's comment that “just because WB is all about standardization doesn't mean standardization has to be all about WB.” Standardization has been essential to the success of Free Software at every level—standard ideas about software programming styles, standard ideas of what a “operating system” is, standard tools for creating, managing, and processing software source code, and so on. But “standard” doesn't always mean “internationally approved by some important body in Geneva”—it just as often means de facto standardization, when “everyone uses what everyone uses.” So in terms of scholarly publishing, there are a lot of de facto standards: standard ideas about what an article is, how long it is and what format, but also standard metadata formats and standard tools for managing and mining citations. Having multiple different versions of an article available may not matter if the standards are robust enough that people can easily know that they are all the same article. But if every different repository, publisher, and scholarly society does things its own way, then that might be a problem.

TB: This strikes me as a good place to encourage us to engage with WB and the AAA. The people involved in AAA decision making are hardworking folks reluctantly goaded into service. Furthermore, by framing our own complicities and involvements (as critics or as editors) in terms of engagement, I think we can continue to argue for the value of an Open Access model for a whole host of reasons. This could include paying attention to the hard, and sometimes invisible, work that the AAA and WB are doing to achieve a version of open access.

CK: I would agree, there are plenty of solutions that allow everyone to benefit without going backward; it is worth the while to build on the solid foundation and reputation of the AAA, and to hold WB to as high a standard as possible. The future of innovative scholarship is not only in the AAA and its journals, but in the structures we build that allow our research to circulate and interact in ways it never could before. Individuals will still write great papers and journals will still publish them, but this is one small slice of what counts as research, and especially as collaborative research. Anthropologists are far from the only people facing these challenges, and in the era of so-called “interdiciplinarity” there are a lot more interesting discussions to have out there, in public, in new networks and new forums, than there are inside the institutions of the journal and the scholarly society as they have always been.¹²

CK: The basic process was no different from publishing any book. The initial difference is only that I convinced Duke to license the book freely on-line and to allow me to distribute and transform it in new ways via a website (all of which I agreed to take responsibility for doing). Duke was enthusiastic about this and managed to get some financial support from the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC). It's not the first time Duke has done this. Both Ian Condry's Hip-Hop Japan and Annalee Newitz's Pretend We're Dead are released under similar licenses, but those authors did not choose to make the book available on-line. I made the case that it was the right thing to do. The Open Access argument is simply that making the book available on line was in my interest, because it will mean that it will be easy to find, easy to cite, and easy to use in classes. But it might also be in Duke's interest; I made the argument that people are more likely to buy the paper book if they can get a look at the book in its entirety digitally (Harper Collins buys this argument, and has just begun a similar experiment).⁸ In a bygone era, people would chance across a book at the bookstore, leaf through it, and then put it back. Realistically, only a few of the many browsers in a bookstore end up buying a book. But today even that small number is dropping for the simple fact that there are fewer bookstores. So I told Duke to think of the website as a bookstore with a huge number of potential visitors, and the on-line version as the browseable version of the book. If a million people download my book, but only 1 percent of them then go on to buy a copy, Duke will still be selling far more copies then they ever dreamed. And what if I sell 5 percent? I'll be a superstar! In some ways Duke was less swayed by this argument and more swayed by the one you mention, that my book is a special case and that my informants (geeks) will expect it to be openly licensed. But I think any anthropologist might make a similar argument about their source communities, and to different degrees.

MFB: As someone who has experimented with a book-related website (for Who Owns Native Culture?), I can confirm Chris's observations about its ability to extend the reach of a book, reinforce its virtues, shore up its weaknesses, and, most important of all, create new and satisfying connections to people working on similar issues.⁹ So I have no quibbles about claims made about the relationship between book publishing and the Internet. However, it is journals that present the tough nut to crack and the weakest element of the arguments presented here. How many of us read every article, or even most of the articles, in a typical issue of the American Ethnologist, the American Anthropologist, Museum Anthropology, or Cultural Anthropology? I would guess few. We receive the entire issue because it is defined by the AAA as a “benefit of membership.” If the contents were available at no cost, wouldn't most of us simply let our membership lapse and cherry-pick the articles that interest us? In an OA regime (which in principle I support enthusiastically), the economics of journal publication would go from perilous to suicidal.

CK: But this isn't different from the case of books: why should anyone buy my book if it is free on-line? Because it's a book. You can't get around that fact, some people want books and will pay for them, to have and to hold forever.

ARG: WB and many other content monopolists complain constantly that it is “impossible to compete with free.” Tell that to the bottled water industry. Just because WB's business model faces a strategic challenge does not mean that the world must stop changing. As far as I'm concerned they should innovate their way out of the problem rather than complain about it.

CK: I agree, and if your sole source of revenue comes from restricting access to paying customers, then free access is a problem. But there are lots of other ways to “add value” to scholarly work—to “manage” it as I put it earlier. Journal articles are becoming a different kind of commodity—and that requires a different way of approaching them. Think about iTunes. Why download a whole album (a whole journal) when you can download just the songs (articles) you want? iTunes has found a way to make money from downloading music even though technically there are free illegal copies of the same music floating around on the Internet. If I could easily compile ten of my favorite essays into a book, either for teaching in class, or for a research project I'm working on, I'd pay for that book too, rather than printing out a bunch of stuff and losing it in folders and in ugly piles on my desk—but no one offers this service, and I sincerely wish someone would. So the question is really how to create a sustainable budget in these new circumstances?

MFB: OK, so is the solution that authors should be asked to contribute financially to the cost of article publication, much as they are by some science journals? Perhaps that is feasible for scholars at the world's best endowed institutions, but what about the rest? Do I need to start creating MySpace pages and PayPal accounts for every article I write? We could presumably scale such fees according to an institution's ability to pay, but that adds a bureaucratic dimension to the process that would be burdensome and distasteful. And where would independent scholars stand in this mess? Furthermore, even wealthy institutions might balk at paying such fees if a significant percentage of them went to bulking up the bottom line of a for-profit publisher. The philosophical virtues of OA are argued here as clearly and as forcefully as anything I've read. It is the pragmatics that give me pause.

ARG: And I'd like to put MFB's skepticism in the anthropological context—as I said earlier, the solution to this problem is to innovate. But innovation requires the capacity to act, which is exactly what the AAA has demonstrated it lacks. So the question is not just “how does one pay for this?” The question is: how could the AAA in particular pay for this? And the answer is: it can't. That is why it has gone the WB route. But the important thing to recognize is that this is a sign of the weakness of the AAA, and not of Open Access business models per se.

JJ: I agree that MFB has stated the friendly skeptic's position on the business model problem rather well. Earlier, I pointed to the growing trend for libraries and library–university press partnerships (and perhaps even mergers) to play a role in solving this problem. In university-based publishing we are moving back to an older pattern of facilitating local faculty projects rather than trying to become, in the case of the university presses, poor copies of the commercial presses. We know why presses took that path (funding), but there seems to be a growing sense that it is an impossible one to continue travelling down. IUScholarWorks Journals got a lot of press (http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/7590.html, accessed May 6, 2008) for the launch of Museum Anthropology Review (http://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/mar), but we were just copying, at one level, arrangements that are already farther along at many research libraries, where to be in the game, your library should publish a suite of gold OA journals (e.g., California [http://repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship/peer_review_list.html, accessed May 6, 2008; 18 journals, including one anthropology journal], British Columbia [http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/; 7 journals including one run by anthros], Wisconsin [http://www.library.wisc.edu/scp/response.html#libraries; Journal of Insect Science]). Doing so is one way that libraries are seeking to decrease their (and our) dependence on predatory commercial publishers and supporting local faculty journal initiatives that cost next to nothing compared to just a handful of toll-access science journal subscriptions.

MFB: So does that mean we should think of anthropology journals like my local National Public Radio station?

JJ: Yes, anchored (often) by a university in partnership with a diversity of supporters and stakeholders, but available even to the needy or the selfish. Related might be the rebirth of the “house journal,” something I have written about a little bit elsewhere (http://blog.openaccessanthropology.org/2008/02/16/open-access-folkloristics-part-1/, accessed May 6, 2008). The crux of the problem is not the business model for new OA journals or for older journals without significant profit addictions—creating the OA journal Museum Anthropology Review has not been a particular challenge (given the availability of open source software and people who want to support the gift economy model). The problem is that our beloved, established journals have become deeply embedded in the structures of for-profit, toll access publishing. Charting a path for the main AAA journals program is daunting, because the financial future of the association, including of its paid staff, are at stake above and beyond the hegemony of industry interests.

CK: Yes and remember, some versions of crossover academic publishing are booming. For instance, a decade ago the front table at the Harvard Bookstore displayed academic books published by university presses. Today it displays books published by mainstream publishers that are written by academics but intended for a popular audience. There is no danger of the “death of the book” or “the death of publishing.” But the days of scholarly books written for scholars and also sold in Borders and Barnes and Noble are long since over.

MFB: Well how about forsaking paper altogether in favor of purely digital editing and distribution? I presume that the cost of distributing physical copies represents one of the single largest costs of any academic journal. If paper were abandoned, the OA approach may become more palatable to all concerned. What are the pros and cons of journals going completely digital?

JJ: It's hard to make claims about the financial costs, but based on the 2005 data for Museum Anthropology, which I edit, “Printing and Distribution” represented only 40 percent of overall expenses. In 2006, my first full year as editor, I had some staff help (a 15-hour-per-week graduate assistant) paid for in part by the section (my college provided fees and tuition in exchange for section funds for a stipend). This caused overall expenses to rise in 2006, and so printing and distribution fell below 40 percent of the overall costs. So speaking in ballpark terms, it seems safe to say that printing and distribution are not insignificant, but they are not the decisive costs. During the University of California Press era, a middle of the pack journal such as Museum Anthropology was probably paying somewhere between $200 and $500 dollars per page, depending on such factors as how much subsidy a host institution was providing to the academic editorial office and the journal's number of institutional subscribers.

CK: This raises the question of the value of editors. The costs of printing or distribution are separate from the value of high-quality editors. All of the editors that I have worked with have been very level headed about going open access, it hasn't been hard to convince any of them (the hard part is convincing the lawyers and the accountants). If libraries paid to publish research, rather than paying subscription fees to buy it back from journals, then the editors would be freed up to innovate in new ways. What needs to be conveyed are the arguments about the nature of value. On the one hand, the most valuable thing for academics is circulation, citation, and attention. Editors know this, and they also make their reputation on such things. If people know the names David Brent, Bill Germano, Ken Wissoker, it's not because of the amount of money they have brought in, it's because of who and what they have published, and the innovative series or traditions they have helped create. On the other hand, such editors have to spend all their time convincing their management, their accounting, their trustees, and most of all their legal departments that this intangible value will translate into a revenue stream. Change the definition of the value stream and there may well be money to be made in university presses, if editors could go back to innovating, rather than defending a broken business model.

ARG: Chris, remember Eric Raymond's distinction between “the Cathedral” and “the Bazaar”? It's a classical statement of the Open Source philosophy you began the interview talking about. In it he contrasts large, cumbersome, hierarchically organized institutions (cathedrals) with collections of small institutions that are quick to innovate (bazaars). His point was that the rise of Open Source and the Internet demonstrated that when it comes to information technology, bazaar-type arrangements are much better than cathedral-type organizations. This is still true today—the kinds of standardization you are talking about are hardly something we need WB to provide. There are all kinds of tools, standards, and metrics being created by groups like SPARC, HASTAC, RoMEO and The Center for History and New Media at George Mason, or the Institute for the Future of the Book.⁶ These are the scholarly equivalent of the Open Source community, not WB, and they can supply exactly the sorts of “computability” you're talking about. When I served on the AnthroSource Steering Committee our goals were to be a node in this wider network that was advancing scholarship—to be part of the bazaar. But the AAA was unable to get anything done without hemorrhaging money, and so it had to sign up to become part of the WB cathedral. As a result all anthropologists who want to be part of the revolution in scholarly communication must do so outside of the AAA, when in fact the AAA is exactly the institution that is supposed to be representing us in the bazaar. This marks a major strategic failure on the part of the AAA. As far as I'm concerned they've made exactly the wrong allies.

JJ: Yes—in a way what is happening now outside of the AAA is a “shadow AnthroSource” that fulfills the ambitions of the original AnthroSource. In its visionary phase, AnthroSource was going to have a subject repository in which we could have put our field notes, white papers, unpublished book manuscripts, etc. I saw this vision die during my first year as an editor. When the AAA couldn't find a university to partner with, the repository was given up and AnthroSource became just a journal bundle. A recent article by (a different) Michael Fisher (http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/an.2008.49.3.16, accessed May 6, 2008) suggests that we revive this vision for the next iteration of AnthroSource. However, we do not actually need AnthroSource anymore because we have already built it up out of various bits and pieces outside the AAA framework. We have a subject repository (Mana'o http://manao.manoa.hawaii.edu/, accessed May 6, 2008), we have a constellation of weblogs and key metablogs (such as antropologi.info), we have people like Mike Wesch and Chris showing us how to mix and match readily/freely available tools to build powerful research collaboratories (like Digital Ethnography [http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=160, accessed May 6, 2008] and Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory/ARC http://anthropos-lab.net/ accessed May 6, 2008), again Mike showed us, with his famous video how to leverage Youtube into a major vehicle for research communication (http://youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g, accessed May 6, 2008), we have organizations like the EVIADA project (Ethnomusicological Video for Instruction and Analysis Digital Archive; http://www.indiana.edu/~eviada/, accessed May 6, 2008) and individual researchers like Kim building powerful, innovative database tools for use in our research and our collaborations with students and communities (http://www.mukurtuarchive.org), there are people (like Rob Leopold at the National Anthropology Archives; http://www.nmnh.si.edu/naa) in many archives and museums building great projects to make the archival database more accessible, we have folks like the team organized by the American Folklife Center and the American Folklore Society building metadata tools like the new ethnographic thesaurus (http://et.afsnet.org/), and as Chris noted recently in a SavageMinds blog post (http://savageminds.org/2007/12/12/the-state-of-open-access-anthro/, accessed May 6, 2008), we have more and more OA journals spanning the topical and international diversity of world anthropology. Will all this stuff somehow function better if it is centralized and put under the control of the home office?

CK: I think that the reason people like AnthroSource is because it provides full-text searching of almost all of the AAA journals. Turning all of that paper into a PDF has incredible value, but it also takes a lot of time and money. WB has the capacity to produce these PDFs but for me the question is: what do we do with them? I think we are best off seeing the WB's digitization and circulation as a service that the AAA purchases from WB in exchange for giving WB a license to sell some of what it has created in certain formats. But it should ultimately remain the AAA's decision whether that information is openly available or not. The vision at the heart of AnthroSource was something other than digitization and selling content—it was something new and creative and focused on moving anthropological research into challenging new configurations, for which open access is, in my opinion, a sine qua non.

JJ: It is worth noting that the Committee on the Future of Print and Electronic Publishing (which is the successor group to the AnthroSource groups) is undertaking work to move forward with the elements that had been abandoned during the journals crisis.7 They have set up a community wiki to crowdsource brainwork on this effort. I would encourage this effort, and I am glad that there is still interest within the AAA leadership in recapturing what was to be. I do worry that it has come too late, as the field has gone ahead and started building such systems in a distributed, networked way outside the AAA context. Compare the lack uptake for the AAA's In Focus: Reflections on Anthropology News blog (which launched with a discussion of open access) relative to OA discussions continuing at Savage Minds and elsewhere. We may now have a permanent case of resistance to organizational life.

Or let's take another example: Because WB uses the same set of standards across all their journals, small specialized journals will benefit whenever big journals suggest a change—a rising tide carries all boats. So every time a biologist complains that their journal, Big, Important Issues in Biology, isn't showing up in Google Scholar, and WB fixes it, then Completely Obscure but Still Important Issues in Phenomenological Anthropology will also start showing up in Google Scholar. By contrast, the AAA listens to small journals, but is unable to do much to help them at a large scale. So the size and monopolistic tendencies of the publishing industry can have some positive externalities, especially when it comes to standardization. Large-scale standardization also potentially makes our research more “computable.” We all know that things like the number of articles (or books) published in peer-reviewed journals and their citation counts are really impoverished metrics of scholarly success. But what if there were other, better metrics that measured peer reception, reuse, argument, and critique?⁴ What if it were possible to generate statistics on how many times an article were taught in classes or discussed on a blog or mentioned in a presentation? What if WB made it easy for research articles to be added to a syllabus, course management website, or other teaching resource, and kept good statistics on that? Wouldn't that be a nice demonstration of success in a tenure file?

MMJF: I'm not sure I want to go down the rabbit hole of more numbers and metrics to evaluate faculty just because we might be able to come up with more complex numbers and metrics. No matter how well it is done I am afraid that going in this direction is going to prevent us from thinking outside the box and getting locked in to one way to evaluate faculty productivity. But I agree that the possibility of sampling many different metrics of significance is interesting. The question is, how do we get operations like WB to add a metric like readership among NGO communities? How could they tell us that others are reading our work and understanding it rather than simply citing it?

KC: That's an important question. Currently departments are ranked by the National Research Council using metrics based on the natural sciences and engineering, which are really poor metrics to use if you are attempting to understand how the humanities and social sciences work. The emphasis here should be on coming up with and implementing methods by which the circulation of our work is tracked and then measured rather than attempting to come up with some single metric that will work for all disciplines. Rigorous self-archiving by scholars is an important part of this—and we don't need to wait for our institutions, the AAA or anyone else to do it for us.⁵ One can archive work in open archives like the recently launched Mana'o Project (http://manao.manoa.hawaii.edu/).

ARG coughs, reaches into pocket and produces Figure 1.

KC: It's not nearly as difficult as it used to be to self-archive via a blog, or to e-mail a copy of your paper to your institutional repository, which allows one the flexibility to make work available all in one place with the relevant metadata and links. Also one can track circulation (to some degree) using Google Analytics or other services. This is not a perfect system, but it is a good way to get started. Best of all, it allows you to make your work available as you like. Perhaps I make my field notes available on my blog, but only to the people with whom I have worked. Perhaps I allow only thumbnails of photos taken in the places I work to be downloaded by anyone, but collaborators can download high-resolution versions. There are a number of ways we can think about this continuum of access and distribution without being locked into one model. We also need to find ways to balance what parts of this labor are worth paying for versus what restrictions we are willing to accept. It costs time and money to do Open Access, just as it does conventional publication, but debate in academia should be about increasing or managing circulation, not paying for access.

JJ: Exactly. The challenge for us now is to retain rights to our work that we may have to sign away to publish in an AAA journal. As an editor (for the time being) of an AAA journal, I can tell you from experience that there are some uncertainties in the AAA author's agreement. It's up to authors and editors to carefully think about what rights need to be maintained in terms of remixing and circulating the work they publish in AAA journals.

ARG: I agree—just because WB is all about standardization doesn't mean that standardization has to be all about WB.

CK: Well, in the era of open access the answer cannot be “for dissemination”—that's simply no longer something we need a large bureaucratic organization to do for us. The answer might be “publication”—but only if it means something more than “making work available.” If we extend publication to include all the things that go into the collaborative work of creating quality scholarship—editing, reviewing, marketing, promoting, circulating, translating, teaching, reading—then perhaps we can see the outlines of an answer to what a scholarly society should be for today. On the one hand, I would fully agree with Kim and Tom that there are all kinds of options for Open Access, depending on the kinds of materials one is talking about (from field notes and data to publications) and one wants to have as much control as possible over the access or restriction allowed to those materials. There are also questions about what kinds of journals serve what purposes—flagship, credentialing, cutting-edge experimental, notes and queries, blogs—and how open they are to which audiences. These are questions about the value of information (or publications, or data, or images or ideas)—not only its cost or ownership, and these are differences to which anthropologists are, or should be, sensitive. On the other hand, there is a moral high ground here: peer-reviewed, published research, especially federally funded research, should not be restricted at all. Another way to put this, at the risk of getting all corny, is that the decision to publish something in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal should be a decision to set it free. Prior to this point there is a range of reasons for, and options for, restricting access or choosing who will get to see something—that is, arguments against publication in the scholarly sense of setting it free.

MMJF: But who would take responsibility for those issues—as in the case of the debates about the military use of information, or cases of fraud, where published information needs retraction or removal; or even cases like the El Dorado case, who should be responsible? Is there a role for the AAA here?

CK: YES! This is what I mean by “management of circulation.” The AAA should not simply print up and mail out our work—they should manage it, promote it, circulate it, put it in front of the people who might use it, whether scholars or others in society. But are they? They issue a press release here and there, they apparently do some lobbying, but overall they seem to have a lackluster consensus-oriented press-release mentality. They don't seem to be particularly interested either in lively blogospheric discussion, or in authoritative statements that put the media or pundits in their place. And these are primarily issues of governance and sustainability to which the AAA always asks “where will the revenue come from?” To me, however, this is a problem of carts and horses: you can't ask the question about revenue and sustainability until you can clearly tell your members—or foundations, or granting agencies, or citizens—what it is you do, and why you should be paid to do it. No one owes scholarly societies anything; no one owes the AAA anything; no one owes the AAA sections anything; indeed anthropology doesn't have to exist in our society—and it's clear that most Americans haven't an airy clue what we do or why it might be important. If I knew that I was paying the AAA $200 a year to really address that failure, and that no one else could do it, I'd pay them $2,000 a year. That's a governance and a leadership issue, not a problem of accounting, or of “mere” publication.

MMJF: Explain to me then why the deal with WB seems to move decision making farther away from the sections? Is it because this will allow them to do a better job of marketing, as they promise?

JJ: Let me take a stab at some of these questions. It's important to distinguish the structural issues from cases of organizational inertia, which may be inevitable, but shouldn't be confused with the problems scholarly societies, universities and libraries face today. The “serials crisis” (the skyrocketing costs for serials that libraries must pay for scholars to have access to cutting-edge research) is a deeply felt concern in research libraries. Most university-based anthropologists understand this because they constantly receive publisher's promotional materials for new commercial journals and at the same time they get yearly updates describing which existing campus journal subscriptions have been dropped for lack of sufficient funds. Publishers, including WB, deny that there is a cost-based journals crisis (Campbell 2006:27). But if we want to think seriously about “sustainability” we must realize that sustaining anthropology means more than sustaining the AAA budget—it means sustaining the viability of research libraries and of our not-for-profit university press partners as well. More and more research libraries today are responding by partnering directly with scholars to “publish” (in Chris's sense) research, and thus they are expanding the library's role in new ways. They are trying to make scholarship more open and more sustainable by cutting out the middleman, the publishing companies. In doing so, they might make commercial publishing less profitable and scholarly societies built around toll access publication profits less sustainable. So whose interests do you align with? I'd like my efforts to help sustain the AAA, but the association's interests are now more congruent with those of the publishing industry, not my library or the university presses. As a result the interests of my ethnographic consultants, my university library, my students, and my colleagues are increasingly in conflict with those of my professional society.²

ARG: This brings up the issue of “capacity.” Jason is exactly right—alliances are forming between libraries and scholars, for instance, and the AAA has sided with the publication industry. Why? One of the key things about Free Software and Open Access that we haven't highlighted enough is that it allows things to get done extremely cheaply if you have the people who know how to work the technology. The AAA has failed to develop low-cost solutions using these methods, it has alienated much of a generation of younger scholars willing to devote their time to developing these solutions, and as a result it has thrown up its hands and outsourced this work to institutions like WB. WB then doubles the price of American Anthropologist, and makes money off of the AAA's inability to manage its own publications program. We are all literally paying the price of the AAA's inability to keep our house in order.

MMJF: Yes, but: one cannot just throw up one's hands and say the AAA is just an unwieldy old organization. Structurally, are there leverage points where we could apply pressure that would make the organization change? Are there are ways to “hack” the AAA, or create workarounds? Can we use these to shift our publication regime toward flexibility and customization rather than uniformity and homogenization? In fact, are these conceptual terms (homogenization, uniformity, flexibility) from old industrial processes the right ones to think with, or what alternatives can we use?

CK: WB has little incentive to become more flexible, quite the opposite I think. WB's expertise is in profit through cost cutting; everything WB can do to make the process of “publishing” an article streamlined across all their journals, regardless of content or scope means that they can cut costs. The fewer specialized demands there are from particular societies or particular subsections of societies, the more money they can save on labor costs. So the pressure to homogenize the process will be significant. This is why decision making has to become more centralized; but it's also why marketing has to be more flexible. If WB wants to sell more subscriptions, their marketing department will have to find creative ways to do that. But there is another question here: what kind of flexibility do we want? Are we talking about flexibility in page counts? The ability to change the font and cover design? Or is it a question of content, images, special issues, new journals, or timeliness and relevance? Was this ever under discussion? Is it clearly specified in the contract? If not, who will negotiate who gets to make the decision? All these questions went unanswered in the transition to WB because the process was internal to the AAA and as far as I can tell, involved the editors only as remote correspondents, not active participants in the deal making.

ARG: I am also very unhappy with our tendency to reify “the AAA”—aren't we, the members, the AAA? And yet it seems that people who are being affected by the AAA's decisions do not have a voice in making them, and that is undemocratic. We need to demand accountability for the decisions being made, and that means figuring out who, exactly, gets to be “the AAA” when “the AAA signs a contract with WB.” How, specifically, are these decisions being made and who is making them?

CK: True, Rex, but my point here is about flexibility. If the lines are drawn around relatively minor things, like page counts or number of images, I think the benefits of going with WB will outweigh any “homogenization” of our articles. However, if it's no longer possible to do something like the “Coke Complex” volume Cultural Anthropology issued last year, then I think we just sold our soul.³ WB might be a giant homogenous Borg, but we can still work within it.

ARG: Chris, reform is the enemy of revolution! Jason has just done a great job describing the way that partnerships are being built between all sorts of institutions ranging from libraries to websites. The homogenization of journal production doesn't just mean that we lose flexibility in terms of what we'd like to do with our journals at the moment, it means that we lose our ability to develop new forms of publication in the future, and it means the AAA is aligning itself with partners whose interests are opposed to those of the membership. This is going to have a chilling effect on all the things that academics want—our freedom to tinker, to innovate, and to decide for ourselves what we want to do and how we want to do it. These larger issues cannot be ameliorated by “flexibility” within the WB arrangements.

JJ: Comrades, please, this isn't the fifth international. It won't do to debate whether reform or revolution are necessary when the issues and processes at work in the AAA/WB are already under way. No one is going to throw down their Golden Bough and their tape recorder and take up arms—or for that matter, start a new scholarly society, are they? One way to answer MMJF's question about decision making (and hacking) is to focus on the actual processes at work in this AAA/WB relationship right now, such as the means by which sections/editors can request changes to their journals. The process of coming up with this structure has itself been relatively transparent and democratic, it's just that it is based on post–WB realities. Decisions about journals (like page counts, special issues, new formats) used to be in the hands of editors/sections because it was the sections (together with those who provided subsidies, like host universities) that paid all the expenses. Now, WB has taken up all the costs with the exception of the academic editorial offices (which must be paid for by the sections, through subsidies, or run on a shoestring). What this means is that the AAA now provides WB with a range of journal editors who bring in a steady stream of journal content, and in return WB provides AAA with specified revenues. With the University of California Press, it was organized differently: the sections paid all of the costs, including paying UC Press for its efforts, the sections shouldered the risk, and the sections had a direct stake in (theoretical) profits.

CK: So what you are saying is that, the sections no longer pay the costs of innovation, but that the power to (decide to) innovate now rests with WB?

JJ: In essence, yes. It actually rests, I think, with WB and the AAA leadership, but WB is looked to as the expert partner prepared to assess real costs and benefits. As I understand it, for the five years of the current contract, the baseline will be where things stood on January 1, 2008. If, however, a journal wants to double the number of words or pages, then someone would need to absorb that higher level of expense, whether the AAA, WB, or the section. For WB to absorb this, they would have to feel confident that the added expense would generate new revenues. However, if WB manages to generate a gazillion dollars in profits, the AAA will share them. In general, (unprofitable) changes made for the good of scholarship or the world would need to be absorbed (as losses) by the AAA or the sections. One-time extra expenses (“lets do a double issue in 2010 in honor of professor so and so”) can be bought by sections if they have the cash, the willingness, and the lead time necessary to gain approvals.

ARG: So now the AAA leadership has a disincentive to make any innovative changes and an incentive to be suspicious of sections funding ongoing “enhancements” for fear that any costs will come to be shifted to WB or AAA? And we must pay WB for the privilege of making up our own minds what should be in these journals?

JJ: Well, more or less. I am sympathetic to some of this, as libraries for instance, need to know what to expect of a journal as both a product and as a cost. Section leadership, section cash on hand, and editorial effort can be quite fluctuating even under stable external conditions. In any event, the way that I see it, the role of sections has greatly shrunken. The print journal is still, in most cases, a membership “benefit” and sections still choose the editors for the journals with which they are associated, but much has been given up in exchange for income and decreased risk exposure. The new problem is the one that Chris has been so eloquent about. The hope for innovation is at the section level, but sections have lost a lot through the combination of AnthroSource journal access for AAA members (which has eroded section memberships) and the structural readjustments brought on by the cost-revenue gap of the UCP period and now by the new arrangements of the WB era.

CK: Two Bits is book about the cultural significance of Free Software, not just the lives and ideas of hackers. As such, its proper object is (and my expertise concerns) the circulation of information after the Internet. In the book I claim that by looking at the case of Free Software in detail, as a response to changing conditions of knowledge production, one can understand a much broader problematic of the circulation and authorization of knowledge of all kinds—whether that means traditional book publishing, Wikipedia entries, scientific data, or remixing and mashups in film and video. The core concern of the book is demonstrating how the circulation of knowledge is related to the desire for and possibility of authentic public spheres (or an authentic civil society) constituted independently of conventional forms of power such as that of governments and corporations. The people creating Free Software are not a social movement with particular ideals that they air in public, but a loose affiliation of people focused on the technical and legal basis of public discourse, whatever that may be. So, in an era when the legitimacy of scientific and political knowledge has become frighteningly unstable (such as in the cases of global climate change, weapons of mass destruction or claims about pharmaceutical efficacy and harms), I think Free Software is “good to think with” in classic anthropological terms; it demonstrates how an alternative system of knowledge circulation and legitimation might be constructed out of the systems and structures of the contemporary world. Open Access is a direct outgrowth of Free Software, and so I am (and many of the others assembled here are) naturally familiar with the basic outlines of both movements. At a deep level both respond to the same changed conditions of practice, and aim at similar ideals of creating authentic publics or civil societies that are both independent and powerful.

MMJF: It seems clear that the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and academic publishing in general, has gotten caught in the middle of this. Last year, in a controversial, quick, and not entirely transparent process, the AAA chose, to the surprise of many in and beyond the association (especially libraries), not to renew its print-publication contract with the University of California Press, and, instead, awarded the new contract to Wiley-Blackwell (WB). There are many issues involved in this negotiation, especially the central one of how we balance dissemination of our work while keeping our budgets in the black. Could you lay out the key structural issues as you see them across the publishing spectrum, including what is specific to anthropology and the AAA, as well as more generally in the scholarly world?

CK: There are two key structural issues that are intimately related: (1) governance of scholarly societies and (2) the changed conditions of publishing. Both of these concerns the AAA directly, because the AAA's business model has depended on publication sales, and any changes to our budget affect the AAA all the way up the line, including issues of governance. My work on Free Software certainly taught me a great deal about the intersection of governance and new technologies—indeed I argue that Free Software wouldn't exist if it weren't for some key historical changes in the possibilities for distribution of software via the Internet combined with tools and practices for governing and coordinating its production. Scholarly work is obviously different—it isn't created in exactly the same fashion as software and it serves different purposes, but the changed conditions are the same: new tools for production and distribution on the Internet. What Free Software effectively did for people was to allow them to ask the question: what do these new conditions make possible that were not possible before? How will the ease of distribution change the meaning of publication?

KC: And not only issues of publication and dissemination: the Free Software movement demonstrated the power of collaboration. It provided anthropologists with a new way to imagine the possibilities of collaboration—beyond collaboration with “informants”—toward a model of collaboration in terms of the creation and distribution of knowledge involving many constituencies. Sites like Flickr allow photo sharing, Wikipedia has altered the mode of knowledge production and Facebook and MySpace have demonstrated the power of social networking through the Internet. These may not immediately seem like tools that have altered anthropology. But think about the idea of uploading your photos from a field site, tagging them, mapping them on Google maps and then allowing others—a range of others—to comment on them. It shifts the way that anthropologists process information, manage data, form arguments, and circulate the materials that they have collected in the field. Not only that, most such sites allow users to define which groups can see what—to define the publics with which they engage. Eric Kansa's project for archaeologists, Open Context (http://www.opencontext.org), is an excellent example.

CK: A key difference between Free Software and scholarly societies, however, is that Free Software did not start inside a 100-year-old organization—it emerged from the voluntary association of individuals interested in achieving similar goals and building technologies in common, standardized and easily modifiable ways. This was an advantage—it's much easier to adapt, change rules and structures at a small scale with no history, than it is for a large-scale organization with firmly set practices.

ARG: I'm not so sure about this point. Free Software was largely started in U.S. research universities and units within them like MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab and much of the organizational structure of Free Software was inspired by the informal networks of scholarship that are academics' bread and butter. Also, much of the idealism of Free Software was inspired by academic ideals of universal education and freedom of speech and research. So I think we have to understand that when we look at Free Software we are looking into a mirror, and seeing our own values and ideals reflected back at us in a transformed and, I'd say, purified form.

CK: Absolutely. Except that the successful Free Software projects succeeded precisely by discovering that idealism and then reinventing new modes of organizations that were parasitic on or symbiotic with the University (like the Free Software Foundation and the AI lab).

ARG: In a way what Free Software created was a “world without deans” or administrations. The ideals and norms should be familiar to academics even if they don't code software.

CK: Yes, they should! My point is only that publishers and scholarly societies have become large, bureaucratic organizations sedimented in their modes of doing things, sometimes for good reasons (stability, reliability), sometimes for bad (tradition, fear, self-interest). Free Software is a reminder of why these organizations were started in the first place and I think they (and the Open Access movements as well) force us to ask once more, and in detailed ways, what are scholarly societies for? Why did we create them? What do they do for us as scholars and as citizens, and what reasons do they have for existing? These are not rhetorical questions—I sincerely think that most academics and most scholarly society administrative staff cannot really answer these questions because these institutions have become so naturalized—it's like asking what universities are for, it seems to many to be a stupid question.

JJ: Exactly. This point is crucial and it shows up in many domains—in Bowling Alone (2000), for instance, Robert Putnam argued that there has been a general decline of participation in civic associations in the United States. Scholarly societies are graying, the demographics are shifting rapidly upward with fewer young scholars participating actively. Many of these younger scholars are using social networking and collaboration tools instead. This is the context in which debates about AAA governance should be understood. I recently overheard a senior scholar and active AAA leader complaining angrily about all the damn chatter on “these blog things.” Chris is asking the right questions—from my point of view, we are at an inflection point that is proving quite painful for some and quite confusing for many.

CK: My worry is that the AAA will just hole up and ignore discussions like this one, or the debate about anthropology in the military, rather than aggressively engaging in them. These changes are painful—they are rapid, expensive, and seemingly capricious or at least unfair, but the AAA has to deal with them. It cannot continue to perceive its role as the representative and chief communicator on behalf of anthropologists—but rather with them. Whatever model the AAA has for doing that doesn't seem to connect with the changed conditions of our scholarly life right now.

KC: I can't underscore enough how changed those conditions have become. We're talking about Open Access, for instance, as something that affects the AAA publication program. But it is about our modes and practices of circulation on a much wider level. Some people suggest that the “open” in OA is taken to mean free for all in the sense of costless or chaotic (or both!). When you view it that way, of course it will seem at odds with the older institutional structures we know well. Another misunderstanding (often pushed by OA enthusiasts themselves) is that Open Access is synonymous with an “information wants to be free” paradigm—one that fetishizes ‘access’ as an all or nothing proposition. But such a position ignores the nuances of various alternative modes of distribution and circulation that emerge from different valuations of knowledge/information. Working on the Mukurtu project (http://www.mukurtuarchive.org) reinforced for me that there is a continuum of choices between totally open and totally closed and we need to focus on the entire spectrum.

ARG: I've argued this in the past as well—when I mention “Open Access,” people think I'm some sort of utopian with no business sense. In fact, I've argued that the AAA can create quite fine-grained approaches to opening, closing, and charging for content.

KC: True. But before we slip into a discussion of the mechanics of the AAA business model, or debates about legal licenses, I want to insist on how wide-ranging the insights of the Open Access movement are. In fact, it seems odd that anthropologists who routinely study and write about a wide range of systems of cultural circulation and forms of “information management” (broadly conceived) are not at the forefront of these OA debates.

JJ: Indeed, Open Access has special moral relevance for anthropology and related disciplines because we have “source communities” that we are responsible to; eagerly so in cases such as those where Kim and I work (Aboriginal Australia and Native North America), but equally amongst the kinds of people Chris describes in his book.1 The AAA's provision of access to tribal and historically black colleges is a worthy gesture, but it does almost nothing to actually make our work accessible to the incredible diversity of source communities that anthropologists work with. A gold Open Access journal or a robust repository effort would get much closer to solving the “obligation to those we study” problem.

TB: I agree with Kim that the idea of Open Access “questions modes and practices of circulation.” As a journal editor one of the most interesting points I've seen in the debates over Open Access is the one Chris has made about the crucial importance of peer review and editorial input in forging high-quality scholarship. In terms of value creation (and thus where money should be paid), Open Access can take the emphasis off the “product” (completed journal articles) and put it on the “process”—it shows that the real value of journals lies in the work contributed by peer reviewers and editors, not the printers who make the physical copies. At the same time this makes us examine how peer review and editing is getting done, which is to say that “openness” is socially constituted and contingent; it is not in a pregiven relationship with the technology. It may turn out that “Open Access” can, in some cases, lead to relatively closed networks!

KC: And there is no pregiven relationship between openness, anthropologists, and our many collaborators either. We tend to assume that technology is always the most important factor in these debates, that it affects everyone the same way (and is often ascribed agency). But it is important that we slow down and break apart the many nodes that shape the Open Access network including the connections and commitments we may have to collaborators, universities, and other institutions and entities.

CK: In some ways what Tom points to here is the issue of accountability, in the precise sense of having clear and explicit norms for which a person or an entity is obligated to take responsibility. Simply making the process of peer review into an explicit value component provided by an editor, an editorial board, and a community of scholars goes a long way toward clarifying what those anthropologists do, as opposed toward what the AAA or WB does. Disaggregating these functions and being a bit more explicit about what value they have, and what cost they bear, is an enormous step toward thinking clearly about new models of publication after the Internet.

Participants in this discussion were asked to add their own voices to a rough document created by CK and MMJF, This conversation occurred over the space of a month and was then edited and rearranged by CK, ARG, and JJ. The resulting document is less a discussion than it is a kind of improvised script, jointly signed by the authors.

JJ: Wait, before we get started, let me get this straight: we are allowed to “add to the conversation” here and rearrange it?

MFB: Yes, this is a little hard for me to understand as well. It's hard enough to cowrite something with one person, but seven?

KC: How else do you expect us to demonstrate that we live in a post-Internet, remix culture where new tools allow new modes of discourse?

ARG: Yeah, new tools that seem to keep breaking! … damn you Google Docs!

MMJF: Anyhow, let's get started…