Anthropology of/in Circulation

2

Notes

1. On “source communities,” see Peers and Brown 2003.

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).