Anthropology of/in Circulation

Making Free Stuff More Affordable

MMJF: Let's return again to the themes I've highlighted, because I think the discussion has drifted from being about the political economy of scholarly societies and the AAA to being about a “shadow AnthroSource” and the promise that new technologies and new modes of circulation might hold for transforming anthropology. Perhaps we can tie this in with Chris's book as an example, as you often suggest that it is an experiment in putting to work your understanding of exactly these changes. Can you say something about the process of publishing the book, and what makes it different? In particular, is what you are doing relevant to all kinds of anthropological research, or only to your peculiar “source community”?

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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.

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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.