Daniel and John —

Glad that you guys have asked this. I’m personally really torn about new publishing models, my loyalties and interests at right angles to each other. The discussion of academic publishing over at Savage Minds and elsewhere online, for example, focusing on the open access movement and what to do about AnthroSource, the American Anthropological Association’s primary journal database, left me deeply troubled.

On the one hand, like many in our field, I crave the disciplinary acceptance and recognition that comes from publishing in our leading journals, not merely because I’m burdened with a fragile ego, but also because I care about certain streams of thought, topics, and approaches and want to promote them, see them discussed prominently. I care about anthropology so it matters to me how our field is thinking about crucial problems.

John’s right, of course, that the authority of academic journals is not likely to decrease anytime soon. If anything, recent moves to try to quantify and rate research output here in Australia have placed even more emphasis on publication in journals with high citation rates or other forms of certification. In Oz, we have a list of journals rated from A* to C, making it abundantly clear where we should publish our research (I posted the list at Culture Matters).

However, in cultural anthropology, some of the journals still considered so highly in measures of esteem and impact have a number of serious problems: 1) much lower citation rate than journals in other fields, 2) low circulation, 3) pay walls and restricted access, 4) incredibly slow turnaround times, and 5) decreasing numbers of library subscriptions. With all of the effort, creativity and extraordinary ideas that go into these publications (yes, I’m serious), it’s a real shame that they are so obscure most of the time and with for-profit companies publishing more and more of the journals, it’s hard to justify contributing free labour to someone else’s product, especially when you end up having to buy it back.

I’d love to publish my work in open access publications, but the OA journals in our field are quite small and sometimes precarious, run more often by industrious graduate students than by scholars central to our field (I mean anthropology here, although biological anth is in better shape than the sociocultural folks in some of these issues). We haven’t successfully placed anthropology in the big open access journals (again, with bio anth the exception), so our field shrinks in relative visibility as others become more accessible. It’s hard to see how we can stand still in a changing environment and not lose ground.

When I recently started looking at the available platforms for publishing an open access anthropology journal, I realized that the one greatest obstacle holding me back (aside from fear of abject failure) was the issue of marshaling colleagues for peer review. I’ll be watching with great interest some of the experiments being done with online, open comment review — I just don’t know how a field can expect to exert any intellectual influence outside its own borders if it hides most of its thinking in hard-to-reach publications and open-access, open-review would be great visibility.

The irony is that open reviews would actually be a real improvement on the current, private review process. In peer reviewed journals, the peer review process is invisible to the reader in the final product; we can’t see the debates, only the final version of the publication.

The sad fact is that private peer review can often force the removal of some of the most contentious and interesting points that an author wants to make. As I’ve written elsewhere, when I’ve tried to publish neuroanthropology stuff, if I even get a foot in the door, reviewers usually want me to strip out the neuro-. If the reviewers find an argument to be a sticking point, it has to go, even though it might be very interesting or well worth considering. Especially for junior scholars, needing publications for tenure and promotion, discretion can be the better part of intellectual debate; sticking points are just dropped in the face of opposition.

Right now, we get a kind of open review, but only piecemeal, in places like John’s weblog (which I use frequently for this purpose), or much delayed and infrequently, in later articles. Even though every peer reviewed piece has received lengthy discussion before publication, the readers don’t get to see the debates or read the reflections of expert reviewers. The privacy can allow the reviewer to write candidly, but the intellectual labor of writing reviews is a bit of a lost resource.

I’d love to see a well supported, open access, open review anthropology journal. This sort of project could be extraordinarily successful in the long run, especially once that ‘small vanguard of digitally adept scholars’ mentioned in the NY Times article does the hard work of cracking through professionally, and can become the tenure reviewers for the next generation. I think it’s inevitable, but I have no idea what the time frame will be. Hope it’s soon.