IANAA, but this is interesting. In anticipation of the American Anthropologists Association annual convention, a group of open access advocate anthropologists have published an open letter opposing the Association’s stance against open access to scientific publication. Apparently, the politics of open access and the AAA are tricky. The executive committee is explicit that their primary opposition to the Federal Research Public Access Act, which is a unusual but potentially wildly important flavour of open access, is that it challenges the business model of AnthroSource, which is some kind of research dissemination thing. However, the guiding committee of AnthroSource have come out publicly and explicitly in favor of the FRPAA. Zowie. In response, the executive committee have fired the AnthroSource guiding committee. Which sends a clear message that if your committee publicly opposes the policies of the executive committee it will be fired.

The public letter of the Open Access Anthropology group is posted on the front page of their wiki, and does a nice job. The overview of their position on open access in anthropology is here.

For the open access novice, OA is basically when scientific papers are available for free on the web. Which sounds like a minor deal, but has significant practical and even ethical guts. Usually what it means is some peer-reviewed OA publisher charges the author, presumably out of the author’s grant money, a couple of thousand buck$ if the publisher does decide to publish the author’s paper. After that, the paper is available money-free and licensing-limited on the internet for any and all to get at. Usually there is an exception for free publishing for researchers who just can’t afford the bill (e.g. from the developing world). If you’ve ever tried to do work outside of an institution with a huge well funded library system (e.g. in the developing world) then you know what a difference this kind of access can actually make.

In his mention of the topic, David Weinberger of Cluetrain Manifesto semi-fame adds this punchy coda:

Access to scientific work is a scarcity that now is artificial. It’s bad for American science and disastrous for global science…and since [] all science is global, it’s just plain disastrous for science.

As always, the Open Access News blog has plenty more on this and every other OA topic. I’ve added OA News back into my stable of monitored blogs because, well, it’s great.