In my recent post on the difficulties of accessing publications on southwestern archaeology, I briefly mentioned self-archiving by academics as a solution to at least one of the problems. I’d like to expand a bit on that here, and point out some archaeologists who are doing this. There aren’t very many yet, but there are a few, and the more people who do this the more likely it becomes that others will follow.
Self-archiving, also known as “green” open access, is the process of academics posting their published work on the internet so that it can be easily and freely accessed by anyone with an internet connection. The idea behind it is that, while publishers charge for journals and edited volumes, the scholars who contribute to articles and chapters don’t get any of that money, so it doesn’t benefit them at all to lock their work away for someone else’s financial benefit. Therefore, when submitting their work, authors should insist on retaining the right to post it freely on their own websites (or in institutional or disciplinary depositories), and do so as a matter of course.
This is no good for the publishers, of course, and if enough people did it no one would buy their journals and the whole academic publishing system as we know it today would collapse, but the whole point of the open access movement is that academic publishing as it exists now is totally screwed up and doesn’t serve to advance scholarship the way it’s supposed to, so destroying that system would be a feature, not a bug.
One interesting thing to note here is that monographs, which are published by those same publishers but this time with the authors sharing in the proceeds, are not part of the deal. No one is calling to put books online for free, because that would be economically disadvantageous to the authors in a way that putting journal articles and chapters in edited volumes up isn’t.
In any case, despite the widespread hatred of academic publishers in many parts of academia, outside of a very few disciplines (physics is a notable example) open access has been slow to catch on. Even self-archiving, which is extremely easy to do, is still very rare. It’s not entirely clear why this is, but a lot of it is probably just inertia and reluctance to embrace technological change. This is particularly in archaeology, which is an extremely change-averse discipline in a lot of ways. One of the main advocates for open access within archaeology is Mike Smith of Arizona State, who talks a lot about this and related issues in his blog on archaeological publishing, and also practices what he preaches by putting his own papers up in an easily accessible place on his personal website. Ironically, his colleagues at ASU have not been quick to follow in his footsteps.
There are a few other archaeologists who have begun to self-archive, however. These even include some southwesternists, so there are some places you can go to find papers about Chaco and other related subjects freely available. Within Chacoan studies specifically, the best people about this are Ruth Van Dyke and Andrew Duff, and many of Duff’s colleagues at Washington State have papers available as well, including Tim Kohler, who has done a lot of work in the Mesa Verde region. One particularly interesting project going on at Washington State is the Village Project, an attempt to use agent-based modeling and advanced computational techniques to find insights into processes of settlement, aggregation, and abandonment in the Mesa Verde region. Phase II of the project, which is just beginning, will begin to look at the northern Rio Grande area as well. Many of the publications associated with the project’s research are available on its website as well.
There are a few other southwestern archaeologists who have done some self-archiving, although it still isn’t very common. One example is Vance Holliday at the University of Arizona, a specialist on the Paleoindian period whom I discussed recently in the context of his work on reevaluating the Folsom type site. Mary Stiner and Barnet Pavao-Zuckerman, also at U of A, have some papers available too, although at this point we’re moving a bit beyond the prehistoric southwest. And speaking of U of A, several of the professors at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research (a very important institution for southwestern archaeology) also self-archive their publications.
On a related note, I see that UNM’s Maxwell Museum of Anthropology is offering its technical series as free pdf files on its website. In addition, the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center has an enormous amount of information available in various forms, including pdf files and online databases. These institutional collections are another important format for open access, and they have the advantage of not being tied to the websites of particular people who may move from one school to another or retire altogether, with unpredictable effects on the websites containing their work.
Overall, while open access is still in its infancy in southwestern archaeology, it is starting to grow, and as time goes on it seems likely that more and more archaeologists will begin to see the virtues of making their work widely accessible. It’s both useful and easy, and it makes scholarship available to a much wider audience outside of academia.
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