Scientists in the field of high-energy physics have been using a disciplinary repository for their papers--both before and after publication in journals--for over a decade. A recent analysis of the citation data in that field has just appeared:
"This is an important study, and most of its conclusions are valid:
(1) Making research papers open access (OA) dramatically increases their impact.
(2) The earlier that papers are made OA, the greater their impact.
(3) High Energy Physics (HEP) researchers were among the first to make their papers OA (since 1991, and they did it without needing to be mandated to do it!)
(4)Gold OA provides no further impact advantage over and above Green OA."
The graphs in the paper showing that papers in the "arXiv" repository are cited five times more frequently than journal papers NOT in the repository are quite dramatic.
Are there any implications for archaeology? Hmmmmmmm.
I have recently come across a new perspective on “agency theory” that makes lots of sense and has nothing to do with the “agency” literature in archaeology. My lack of enthusiasm for that literature is public knowledge (Smith, and Schreiber 2005); I have always found archaeological agency theory to be either obvious and trivial (the actions of people make a difference in the world! Leapin’ lizards!), or else so ethereal and philosophical that I lose interest. (Yes, I am a materialist and a skeptic, and I’m sure that any sophisticated archaeological theorists who read this will snigger at my simplistic views).
Over the past year, in exploring some areas of scholarship outside of anthropology, I have learned that the term “agency” has a very different meaning in political science and economics. I am now reading on comparative taxation systems (in preparation for a conference where I will have to put the data on Aztec taxation into a comparative framework, using terms and concepts from political science and economic history). It turns out that there is a body of scholarship focused on “agency theory,” and it has nothing to do with Bourdieu or Giddens or hand-wringing over whether the actions of people make a difference in society.
Agency theory in political science and economics is about the delegation of power and authority by rulers and governments. It concerns the ways in which “principals” (those in charge of some domain) ensure (or fail to ensure) that their wishes and orders get carried out by their delegates or “agents.” How does the king make sure that his tax collectors are doing their job and not ripping off the crown? Is it better to have a staff of salaried officials collecting taxes, or will tax-farming produce more revenue? How does President Obama know whether federal bureaucrats are carrying out his plans and not backsliding or subverting his orders?
According to agency theory, principals do better at getting their agents to do their bidding faithfully and efficiently when two conditions are met: (1) when the principal and agents share common interests, and thus desire the same outcomes; and (2) when the principal is knowledgeable about the agent’s activities. This approach was pioneered by Max Weber (1978); here are some modern studies I have found useful: (Cosgel, and Miceli 2009; Kiser 1999; Levi 1988; Lupia 2001; Swedberg 2003).
I have not seen any references in this literature to the divergent use of the concept of “agency” in other branches of the social sciences (including anthropology and archaeology), nor do I recall seeing any mention of the sociology/political science usage in the archaeological literature. It seems that two very different bodies of scholarship have been chugging along for more than a decade, using the same phrase—as a major concept—in very different ways. If I see the term “agency” in the contents of an archaeology journal, my eyes glaze over and I skip to the next paper, but now if I see it in a journal in comparative political science, economic history, or sociology, I stop and take a look.
That this kind of disciplinary isolation is not a good thing has been pointed out by many observers (Wallerstein 2003), including archaeologists (Butzer 2008). I know that my own graduate training emphasized that the only disciplines that matter for archaeologists—apart from technical fields like ethnobotany or geology—are anthropological archaeology and cultural anthropology. Today, I feel quite differently. The kind of archaeology I pursue is more usefully viewed as a comparative social/historical science than as a branch of anthropology. (I have nothing against anthropology. Some of my best friends are anthropologists. But as an intellectual context for archaeology, anthropology is incredibly confining and limiting).
I don’t have any recommendations about resolving the conflicting definitions of “agency” in different fields. But it is definitely the case that attention to broader realms of scholarship can be enriching for archaeologists. The only archaeologists I know who pay any attention to issues of agency theory (the kind I like, that is) are Richard Blanton and Lane Fargher, whose work I highly recommend (Blanton, and Fargher 2008; Fargher, and Blanton 2007).
References
Blanton, Richard E. and Lane F. Fargher(2008)Collective Action in the Formation of Pre-Modern States. Springer, New York.
Butzer, Karl W.(2008)Other Perspectives on Urbanism: Beyond the Disciplinary Boundaries. In The Ancient City: New Perspectives on Urbanism in the Old and New World, edited by Joyce Marcus and Jeremy Sabloff, pp. 77-94. SAR Press, Santa Fe.
Cosgel, Metin M. and Thomas J. Miceli(2009)Tax Collection in History. Public Finance Review 37:399-420.
Fargher, Lane F. and Richard E. Blanton(2007)Revenue, Voice, and Public Goods in three Pre-Modern States. Comparative Studies in Society and History 49:848-882.
Kiser, Edgar(1999)Comparing Varieties of Agency Theory in Economics, Political Science, and Sociology: An Illustration from State Policy Implementation. Sociological Theory 17:146-170.
Levi, Margaret(1988)Of Rule and Revenue. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Lupia, Arthur(2001)Delegation of Power: Agency Theory. In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, pp. 3375-3377. Pergamon, Oxford.
Smith, Michael E. and Katharina J. Schreiber(2005)New WorldStates and Empires: Economic and Social Organization. Journal of Archaeological Research 13:189-229.
Swedberg, Richard(2003)Principles of Economic Sociology. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Wallerstein, Immanuel(2003)Anthropology, Sociology, and Other Dubious Disciplines. Current Anthropology 44:453-465.
Weber, Max(1978)Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. 2 vols. University of California Press, Berkeley.
BELOW: "Agency" (an agent at work). The guy at the right is a labor boss in charge or organizing corvée labor for an Aztec king. Each face with a flag symbolizes 20 workers, and the face with the feather stands for 400 more workers. From the San Andrés Codex (Galarza, Joaquín, 1963 , Codex San Andrés (juridiction de Cuautitlan): Manuscrit Pictographique du Musée de l'Homme de Paris (II). Journal de la Société des Amréicanistes 52:61-90. For some more cases of Aztec labor taxation, see two posts on my Calixtlahuaca project blog (post 1)(post 2).
"Elsevier officials said Monday that it was a mistake for the publishing giant's marketing division to offer $25 Amazon gift cards to anyone who would give a new textbook five stars in a review posted on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. While those popular Web sites' customer reviews have long been known to be something less than scientific, and prone to manipulation if an author has friends write on behalf of a new work, the idea that a major academic publisher would attempt to pay for good reviews angered some professors who received the e-mail pitch."
This and other recent scandals from commercial presses make one wonder about the trend of the commercialization of scholarship. What if we just had independent scientific journals, posted on the internet, with strict peer review but no commercial sponsorship? Wouldn't that be a good thing for resesarch, for researchers, and for disciplines? It's called Gold Open Access. Does it sound expensive or unlikely? Then perhaps we should think about posting our peer-reviewed published papers in institutional repositories (Green OA). Again, this is a way to make scholarship openly available without relying on commercial publishers, who don't always seem to have the highest ethical standards.
When I have asked some colleagues why they don't post their papers on the internet, they have replied that it's too complicated, they don't know how to create a web page, they don't understand html, etc. etc. But it is just not that difficult a task. I am certainly no whiz at internet technology, but I've been creating web sites and posting papers for years. If you are associated with a university, your IT people can help you get set up with a home page, and show you how to maintain it and post your papers, images, datafiles, whatever. Once you get the hang of it, it does not take much time. For me, it is part of what I call my scholarly maintenance routine: entering new references into Endnote, keeping up with the journals, and other things I do regularly as part of being a scholar.
I am amazed at the number of professional archaeologists who do NOT post their papers online. Why do we publish journal articles and book chapters? Certainly not for the money. But whether we publish because we feel obligated, or to share our results with others, or for the glory of seeing our names in print—in all these cases we publish so that people will read what we write. If you post your papers on the internet, more people will read them, more people will cite them. IN technical terms, they will have greater impact. This is good for you as a scholar, it is good for the people who read or look at your papers, and it is good for the profession.
To me, this question is a complete no-brainer, which is why I am constantly amazed at colleauges who do not self-archive their publications.
Right now I am feeling like a technical whiz, since I just figured out how to update my university web page from Mexico (it is so easy to do from my office on campus that I forgot some of the steps involved in setting up the right kind of file transfer systen). The main reason I wanted to do that was to post my latest publication, an article on the context and influence of V. Gordon Childe's concept of the "Urban Revolution." Even with interruptions for watching the piñata and eating a piece of birthday cake (there is a 3-year old birthday party going on downstairs), it did not take much time to figure out the new system.
One of the new mass-produced Open Access journals published by Benthan Scientific accepted a bogus hoax paper. A Cornell grad student and an editor from the New England Journal of Medicine submitted a paper to the “Open Information Science Journal” titled “Deconstructing Access Points.” The text is complete gibberish; the authors (acting under pseudonyms) listed their affiliation as the “Center for Research in Applied Phrenology” (C.R.A.P. for short).
In subsequent news, the journal's editor resigned, and members of the Editorial Boards of other Bentham OA journals are also resigning.
I have blogged on Bentham's journal "Open Access Anthropology" before: (my post from June 22, 2008). I can't say for sure that this journal would not accept a bogus nonsense paper, but I wonder if it may accept low-quality papers (I say this very tentatively, since none of the papers published so far are close to my own areas of competence).
It is possible that this event may give ammunition to some ignorant people who think that Open Access means lack of peer review. But the problem here is not open access, but rather the LACK or peer review. Peer review is peer review, whatever the kind of journal. Bad peer review exists in respected print journals (I'm sure anyone reading this can think of some examples), and the problems are not open access or peer review in general, but rather poor scholarly implementation of these processes. In many cases, the lapses can be attributed to commercial factors, whether Elsevier's drug-company publicity rags masquerading as scientific journals, or fake fee-generating conferences (see below), or fee-paying OA journals like Bentham's.
One final note on this affair. The authors used SCIgen to produce their bogus paper, a text generator that produces context-free prose in computer science in article format, complete with tables, graphs, and references. In other words, the paper produces gibberish that is gramatically correct and looks like scientific prose at first glance. (the SCIgen page also has information on bogus for-fee conferences that accept all papersfor a large fee, including hoax, nonsense papers; I've been invited to a few of these and you may have been invited also, if you ever received in invitation for a large conference that seemed too broad and strange in its coverage). Now SCIgen will not produce papers that look at all archaeoelogical, but the Post-Modern Text Generator may be closer. When you visit the site, hit the refresh button to generate new meaningless postmodern papers.
I am very tempted here to try an experiment, but I really dont have time for such fun and games right now.....
Steven Harnad just published a summary of a longer exchange debate between himself (favoring Green OA as the top priority) and Stuart Shieber of Harvard, who favors an emphasis on Gold OA. If you are new to this, Gold OA is the founding, support, and use of open access journals, whereas Green OA is the posting of peer-reviewed papers (pre- and post-publication) in institutional repositories. See some of my previous posts on Green OA, or the E-Prints self-archiving FAQ. My sympathies are with Harnad on this.
Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:13:33 -0400 From: Stevan Harnad Subject: The Argument Against (Premature) Gold OA Support
** Cross-Posted **
I have written a response to http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2009/06/11/the-argument-for-gold-oa-s= upport/ "The argument for gold OA support" by Stuart Shieber.
The full response is at: http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/590-guid.html "The Argument Against (Premature) Gold OA Support"
Here is just the summary:
What is needed in order to provide universal OA as quickly and surely as possible is for universities (and funders) to mandate that their own researchers provide (Green) OA by depositing their articles in their institution's OA repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. It is both a strategic and a conceptual mistake to think that money has to be spent at this time on paying for publishing in Gold OA journals. Gold OA journals' time will come if and when universal Green OA makes subscriptions unsustainable. Then publishers will cut costs and downsize to just providing the service of managing peer review, paid for by institutions out of their windfall subscription cancellation savings. Universities and funders should not be either distracted or deterred from mandating Green OA now by thinking that they first need to provide funds to pay for Gold OA. (Once they have adopted a Green OA mandate, this is no longer a distraction or deterrent and they can of course do whatever they like with their spare cash.)
(1) Any needless cost at all associated with adopting and implementing a Green OA mandate is a deterrent to arriving at consensus on adoption, not an incentive.
(2) Minimal costs for Harvard U are not necessarily minimal for HaveNot U.
(3) The way to explain the possible eventual transition to universal Gold OA is via its causal antecedent: universal Green OA.
(4) The way to allay worries about Learned Society Publishers=92 future after universal Green OA is to explain the simple, straightforward relation between institutional subscription collapse and institutional subscription cancellation savings, and how it releases the funds to continue paying for publication via Gold OA. (And remind faculty that if their institutions really want to keep subsidizing Learned Society publishers' "good works" (conferences, scholarships, lobbying) as they are now through subscription-fees, they can certainly continue to do so through publication fees too, as a surcharge, on the Gold OA model, if they wish.)
(5) Reserve any plans for promoting pre-emptive payment of Gold OA fees for those institutions that have already mandated Green OA (and preferably only after we are further along the road from 85 mandates to 10,000!).
(6) Pre-emptive payment for Gold OA before universal Green OA just retards and distracts from providing and mandating Green OA. Moreover, it is incoherent and does not scale ("universalize"): It is like an Escher drawing, leading nowhere, even though it seems to.
Reviews of archaeological books on urbanism are starting to appear on the H-Urban Forum. I have been a review editor for H-Urban for just under a year, charged with increasing coverage of ancient cities. My first review has just been published, by Steve Lekson on:
Although the book is not new, it was recently released in paperback, which justifies the review; I also think the book is very important and deserves wider readership.
The following reviews have been submitted and edited, and will appear soon on H-Urban:
Bauer, Brian S. (2004) Ancient Cuzco: Heartland of the Inca State. University of Texas Press, Austin.
Dobbins, John J. and Pedar W. Foss (editors) (2007) The World of Pompeii. Routledge, New York.
Marcus, Joyce and Jeremy Sabloff (editors) (2008) The Ancient City: New Perspectives on Urbanism in the Old and New World. SAR Press, Santa Fe.
I also have a bunch of books out for review right now.
Robert Chidester, another new review editor for H-Urban, is a historical archaeologist, and he has commissioned a number of reviews on urban topics related to archaeology. This is a fertile time for urban research by historical archaeologists, with a bunch of good recent books. One of the first of these that will appear soon on H-Urban is a review of this outstanding book:
Voss, Barbara L. (2008) The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Race and Sexuality in Colonial San Francisco. University of California Press, Berkeley.
If you know of new books on ancient/preindustrial urbanism that should be reviewed by H-Urban, drop me a line. Also, if you would be interested in reviewing books, let me know. Right now I do not have any new books to send out (some publishers are either very slow to send books, or perhaps they will not send them to H-Urban at all), but I get H-Net to solicit new books from publishers whenever I find a relevant title.
- posted from Toluca, Estado de México, where I am sorting sherds in order to understand the economy and society of the Aztec-period urban center of Calixtlahuaca.
The Journal of Archaeology in the Low Countries has just been launched. This is an Open Access journal sponsored by a group of organizations in the Netherlands and Belgium. Published by the Amsterdam University Press, the journal has a distinguished Editorial Board and Advisory Board. The inaugural issue has a diverse set of articles, on topics ranging from coins to stable isotopes to eelgrass, and from agency to "Virilis the veterinarian."
This looks like a great journal, but this does not surprise me at all. I spent a week at in the Low Countries (mostly at Leiden University) a few years ago, and the Dutch and Belgian archaeologists impressed me greatly with their skills, their scholarly productivity, and their intellectual energy.
I wish people and organizations in my own areas of interest were as enlightened as the founders of this journal. Just compare JALC to the commercially-oriented Open Anthropology Journal and you will see why I despair. I blogged about that journal when it started up, and a year into its existence I can't say that my opinion of it is very high. And of course my suggestions that the Society for American Archaeology might want to consider starting an OA journal were met with stony silence (and that silence cannot be attributed to the obscurity of this blog, because I also published my suggestion in a letter to the SAA Newsletter).
Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did not disclose sponsorship, the company has admitted."
[Elsevier called these pseudo-journals "sponsored article publications." --MES]
... The bitter irony is that Elsevier, along with the other major academic publishers, have spent the last few years ceaselessly lobbying against the open access movement, on the grounds that open access journals can’t be trusted to maintain the high quality of peer review that the commercial publishers provide. Any guesses as to whether Elsevier will rethink that stance following this fiasco? ..."
... So – as many have noted – here is a commercial company which has campaigned to rubbish Open Access as “junk science” behaving in a manner which totally destroys any trust in their ethics and practice. I have no option but to say that I now cannot absolutely trust the ethical integrity of every piece of information in Elsevier journals.
The need for Open, trusted, scientific data and discourse is now clear. The scientific societies are well placed to help us make the change from closed paper to open trusted semantic digital. They clearly need a business model that transforms the new qualities into a revenue stream. This will not be easy but it has to be tried – there is no alternative. Some of the modern tools will help – the ability to mashup, aggregate, etc. will lead to new forms of high-quality information that will have monetary value. Certified validated information will lead to productivity gains and may be a valuable commodity. ...
Archaeology, of course, does not have anywhere near the level of commercial incentives that can generate this kind of unethical practice in journal publication. But what about junk edited volumes? Could commercial incentives trump scientific value for some of these? I remain puzzled at the program of evidently non-peer-reviewed edited books put out by Nova Scientific Publishers, but I have no evidence that commercial factors outweigh scientific factors in these books. And most professionals could tell a story or two about cases where journal peer review went out the window for one reason or another. But then we don't have a venue for discussing such activities. I hear from one or two colleagues each year with complaints about unethical or capricious or bizarre behavior by editors, reviewers, publishers, and others. Other than give personal advice, there is not much I can do because I typically lack both definitive data and some kind of official status that might warrant meddling in other peoples' business.
A month ago I got a solicitation to contribute a chapter to an edited volume on the built environment. The message came from Frank Columbus, President and Editor-in-Chief, Nova Science Publishers, Inc. I did some looking on the Nova Publishers web site, and also on some discussion sites such as the Chronicle of Higher Education Forum and others. It seems they they are sending out mass email solicitations to contribute to edited collections, mostly edited by Frank Columbus, on a variety of topics. I concluded that this was some kind of pseudo-scholarly vanity press and forgot about it.
Yesterday I got another of these emails from Mr. Columbus. This is how it starts:
Dear Dr. Smith, We have learned of your published research on sports. We would like to invite your participation in our publishing program. In particular, I have in mind a new research or review article for an edited collection (invitation only) being assembled under my direction tentatively entitled "Women in Sports." The contributions for this edited book are intended to range from 4,000-35,000 words. If you are interested in participating, please consult the Notes for Contributors at the bottom of this letter.
Wow, I must have forgotten about my publications on sports! Actually, this is probably another example of the "Mike Smith" confusion; see the list of "Books by Michael Smith that I did NOT write." No, I am not the decorator of the Obama White House, and I was not the winning jockey at the Kentucky Derby a couple of years ago. And I have not published on women in sports.
My advice to graduate students, if you get one of these solicitations: HIT THE DELETE BUTTON! I have already expressed my low opinion or many or most edited volumes in archaeology (see my archive entries under "Edited Volumes"); these Nova Science books are sure to occupy an even lower rung on the ladder of quality.
It looks to me like the field may be moving toward a more reasonable explanation of the Maya collapse. Nevertheless, reading the remarks from Pringle's interviews with some of the scholars involved shows that an old problem still has a major effect on the issue. That problem is when one's theoretical perspective (or preconceptions) largely determine one's understanding of a phenomenon, with only tenuous connections to the data. There have long been two polar positions on drought and the Maya collapse:
(1) Many climatologists tend to think that a serious drought will cause a society to collapse. When they identify drought conditions close in time to the Maya collapse, then the issue is resolved. The drought caused the collapse. Period. End of story. Maya society must have been sufficiently fragile to be knocked out by an environmental disater, so why waste time with special pleading. Scholars with this perspective have a rather narrow, deterministic view of causality and social change.
(2) Many archaeologists tend to think that people are creative and can find solutions to environmental and social problems. Perceptions and impacts of the environment are culturally constructed and culturally mediated. The Maya people were were creative and their society was resilient, and thus environmental problems or disasters could never cause a collapse by themselves. Scholars with this perspective often have a narrow, non-materialistic view of causality and social change.
Now almost everyone will immediately claim that the best explanation is somewhere in between these two extreme views, but just where will it lie along the continuum? Read Pringle's report and see what you think. I am not going to take sides or point fingers here (mainly because I don't have time right now; it would be fun to take an skeptical outsider's perspective on the Maya collapse). If you are interested, I list below a few of the relevant publications.
Oh, one more thing. There is now a revisionist claim that the Maya didn't really collapse (e.g., Aimers 2007). Well, what happened to the millions of people? Why were scores of cities abandoned? Why did much of elite culture disappear? To me, this is an absurd claim, analogous to the claim that Rome didn't really collapse (see Ward-Perkins 2006 for the archaeological evidence againts revisionist claims about the lack of a Roman collapse). But I guess if the Maya didn't collapse, then we don't have to worry about the cause of that non-collapse.
So, what does this have to do with archaeological publishing? Although there is some overlap, scholars promoting the two views outlined above tend to publish in different journals and volumes. They tend to write for different audiences, and they generally employ different kinds of data and distinct style of argument. Many writers seem more interested in defending a position than in an open exploration of the issues. For this reason I suspect that advances will come from new kinds of data ("Ultralocal paleoclimate indicators" in Pringle's report), and from young or outside scholars who are not yet firmly entrenched in the debates.
Aimers, James J. (2007) What Maya Collapse? Terminal Classic Variation in the Maya Lowlands. Journal of Archaeological Research 15:329-377.
Demarest, Arthur A. (2001) Climatic Change and the Classic Maya Collapse: The Return of Catastrophism (review of The Great Maya Droughts by Richardson B. Gill). Latin American Antiquity 12:105-107.
Diamond, Jared (2004) The Maya Collapses. In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, edited by Jared Diamond. Viking, New York.
Gill, Richardson B. (2000) The Great Maya Droughts: Water, Life, and Death. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.
Gill, Richardson B., Paul A. Mayewski, Johan Nyberg, Gerald H. Haug and Larry C. Peterson (2007) Drought and the Maya Collapse. Ancient Mesoamerica 18:283-302.
Manahan, T. Kam (2004) The Way Things Fall Apart: Social Organization and the Classic Maya Collapse of Copan. Ancient Mesoamerica 15:107-126.
Peterson, Larry C. and Gerald H. Haug (2005) Climate and the Collapse of Maya Civilization. American Scientist 93:322-329.
Rice, Prudence M. (2007) The Classic Maya 'Collapse' and its Causes. In Gordon R. Willey and American Archaeology: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and William L. Fash, pp. 141-186. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
Scarborough, Vernon L. (2007) The Rise and Fall of the Ancient Maya: A Case Study in Poliltical Ecology. In Sustainability or Collapse? An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth, edited by Robert Costanza, Lisa J. Graumlich and Will Steffen, pp. 51-60. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Webster, David (2002) The Fall of the Ancient Maya: Solving the Mystery of the Maya Collapse. Thames and Hudson, New York.
Ward-Perkins, Bryan (2006) The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. Oxford University Press, New York.
Another example of academics confused about Open Access has just been published. I suspect that this kind of confusion affects many archaeologists; otherwise why wouldn't more of us know about OA and promote OA? I have yet to hear an argument AGAINST OA from an archaeologist.
The following entry is a reply to that publication. It is cross-posted from the American Scientist Open Access Forum (a listserv moderated by Stevan Harnad):
Date: Sat, 9 May 2009 17:32:12 +0100 From: "Andrew A. Adams" Subject: Kathryn Suhterland's Attack on OA in the THE
For those who haven't seen it, Kathryn Sutherland of University of Oxford, wrote an attack on internet accessible writing and singled out OA for an ill-conceived polemic in the 30th April issue of the Times Higher Educationmagazine:
I have submitted a response to this as a letter to the editor today (no idea if it will be chosen for publication):
---------------------------
Kathryn Sutherland ("Those who disseminate ideas must acknowledge the routes they travel" - THE 30th April 2009) appears to fundamentally misunderstand the goals of the Open Access movement. There are many current challenges faced by academia worldwide that she discusses but her conflation of issues of the purposes of humanities research, the approach to material, the credit gained for an author for their writing, the money flowing in academia, and the various aspects of copyright (the right to attribution, the right to disseminate copies, the right to make derivative works) is rather a mess. The worst element for me is the suggestion that Open Access will somehow automatically and inexorably undermine careful reading of material, and the attribution of ideas and words to their originator. That is complete nonsense. It seems the Open Access proponents must repeat in every forum the basic goal ad infinitum. Open Access is about removing barriers to reading peer-reviewed journal articles which authors already give away for free. It is NOT about requiring books for which their author is paid to give the material away online for free. It is NOT about undermining the peer review and journal editorial quality controls. it is about making sure that scholars and scientists worldwide have access to the full output of each other.
Sutherland's complaints of the explosion of material is nothing to do with OA but with the increase in the number of researchers (based at least partly on the expansion of the undergraduate population leading to an expansion of staff numbers and an expansion of research output), the pressure on researchers to publish (publish-or-perish and least-publishable unit) and the greed of publishing companies who are starting more journals than ever in an attempt to cash in on these pressures on staff to publish. Open Access is one of the solutions to this problem in that too many publications and too many papers published in them automatically creates an access issue for most outside the richest universities (almost no university can afford to carry all academic journals and hence access is restricted for readers at almost all institutions). Open Access also provides the possibility of a huge improvement on the issue of academic plagiarism: while electronic versions of articles may be easier to cut-and-paste into a new work, the length of academic papers generally has never precluded re-typing anyway, but the huge array of material published now makes detection by peer review less likely.
However, if all articles were available online without publisher toll gates, then plagiarism checking could become as easy and automatic for journal submissions as it is becoming for student essays. Battling misappropriation/plagiarism, lazy academic writing, lazy academic study is completely orthogonal to the question of Open Access. This requires academia to take along hard look at its practices and the pressures that lead to unethical behaviour. It does not require us to perpetuate restrictions on access to peer-reviewed publications necessitated by the era of the printing press and entirely possible to sweep away in the era of the internet.
--------------------------- I have also posted a longer response on my blog at:
I heard from colleagues at the SAA meetings in Atlanta last week that Felipe Solis had just died in Mexico City. Mesoamericanists and museum professionals will recognize his name, but for others, Solis was curator of the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City and a noted expert on Aztec sculpture, art, and archaeology. There will be lots of obituaries, scholarly tributes, and biographical pieces coming out soon about Felipe. Here, I want to use him as an example to comment on an aspect of archaeological publishing: The importance of publishing museum collections. I will briefly discuss his publications in three categories. None of these lists are complete; they are meant to illustrate the quality and quantity of his published works.
1. Scholarly papers on Mesoamerican art and architecture:
Solís Olguín, Felipe R.(1982)The Formal Pattern of Anthropomorphic Sculpture in the Ideology of the AztecState. In The Art and Iconography of Late Post-Classic Central Mexico, edited by Elizabeth H. Boone, pp. 73-110. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC.
Solís Olguín, Felipe R.(1985)Arte, estado y sociedad: la escultura antropomorfa de México-Tenochtitlan. In Mesoamérica y el centro de México: Una antología, edited by Jesús Monjarás-Ruiz, Rosa Brambila and Emma Pérez-Rocha, pp. 393-432. Instituo Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City.
Solís Olguín, Felipe R.(1986)La estructura pirámidal de Castillo de Teayo: un edificio en proceso constructivo o un peculiar estilo arquitectónico. Cuadernos de Arquitectura Mesoamericana 8:73-79.
Solís Olguín, Felipe R.(1987)Elementos rituales asociados a la muerte del sol entre los mexicas. In Arte Funerario: Coloquio Internacional de Historia de Arte, edited by Beatriz de la Fuente, pp. 65-76. vol. 2. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City.
Solís Olguín, Felipe R.(1992)Evidencias arqueológicas de la práctica del juego de pelota en la antigua México-Tenochtitlan. In El juego de pelota en Mesoamérica: raíces y supervivencia, edited by María Teresa Uriarte, pp. 143-155. Siglo Veintiuno, Mexico City.
Solís Olguín, Felipe R.(1997)Andrés Molina Enríquez y la arqueología de Jilotepec Estado de México. Expresión Antropológica (Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura) 4-5:43-48.
Solís Olguín, Felipe R., Richard F. Townsend and Alejandro Pastrana(1996)Monte Tláloc: un proyecto de investigación de etnohistoria y arqueología. In Los arqueólogos frente a las fuentes, edited by Rosa Brambila Paz and Jesús Monjarás-Ruiz, pp. 157-169. Colección Científica. vol. 322. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City.
2.Large-format books, including catalogs of major museum exhibits.
García Moll, Roberto, Felipe R. Solís Olguín and Jaime Bali(1990)El tesoro de Moctezuma. Chrysler México, Mexico City.
Matos Moctezuma, Eduardo, Alfredo López Austin, Miguel León-Portilla, Felipe R. Solís Olguín, Miguel A. Fernández and José Enrique Ortiz Lanz (editors)(1995)Dioses del México Antiguo. Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City.
Matos Moctezuma, Eduardo and Felipe Solis(2005)The Aztec Calendar and Other Solar Monuments. Grupo Azabache, Mexico City.
Matos Moctezuma, Eduardo and Felipe R. Solís Olguín (editors)(2002)Aztecs. Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Serra Puche, Mari Carmen and Felipe Solís Olguín (editors)(1994)Cristales y obsidiana prehispánicos. Siglo Veintiuno, Mexico City.
Solís Olguín, Felipe R.(1991)Gloria y fama mexica. Smurfit Cartón y Papel de México; Museo Franz Mayer; Galería Arvil, Mexico City.
Solís Olguín, Felipe R.(2004)The Aztec Empire: Catalogue of the Exhibition. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Solís Olguín, Felipe R. (editor)(2004)National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City. Harry N. Abrams, New York.
Solís Olguín, Felipe R. and Ted Leyenaar (editors)(2002)Art Treasures of Ancient Mexico: Journey to the Land of the Gods. Niewe Kerk, Amsterdam.
Solís Olguín, Felipe R., Gabriela Uruñuela, Patricia Plunket, Martín Cruz and Dionisio Rodríquez (editors)(2007)Cholula: The Great Pyramid. Editorial Azabache, Mexico City.
Early in my career I was dismissive of books like this as lavish, colorful, “coffee-table” books, nice for art historians perhaps but not much use for a dirt archaeologist like me. I have now reversed my opinion, recognizing these as important scholarly works. First, most of these books make contributions to scholarship on Aztec and Mesoamerican art and archaeology. Second, they bring the objects and scholarship to a wider audience. And third and most relevant for this blog, they are important vehicles for the publication of museum collections.
3. Catalogs of Museum Collections
This category consists not of catalogs of public exhibits, but catalogs of the thousands and thousands of objects in museum storage facilities. Solís published a number of catalogs of collections, mostly of Aztec objects.
Castillo Tejero, Noemí and Felipe R. Solís Olguín(1975)Ofrendas mexicas en el Museo Nacional de Antropología. Corpus Antiquitatum Americanensium vol. 8. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City.
Solís Olguín, Felipe R.(1976)La escultura mexica del museo de Santa Cecilia Acatitlan, Estado de México. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City.
Solís Olguín, Felipe R.(1981)Escultura del Castillo de Teayo, Veracruz, México: catálogo. Cuadernos de Historia del Arte vol. 16. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Mexico City.
Solís Olguín, Felipe R. and Davíd A. Morales Gómez(1991)Rescate de un rescate: colección de objetos arqueológicos de el Volador, ciudad de México. Catálogo de las colecciones arqueológicas de Museo Nacional de Antropología. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City.
And finally, here are some museum catalogs that were published with the help and encouragement of Felipe Solís. This is a series of catalogs, and I find that my bibliography file lacks a number of them (i.e., my list is very incomplete):
Díaz Oyarzábal, Clara Luz(1990)Colección de objetos de piedra, obsidiana, concha, metales y textiles del Estado de Guerrero: Museo Nacional de Antropología. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City.
Flores, Dolores and Araceli Rivera Estrada(1992)Ofrendas funerarias de Chupícuaro, Guanajuato: catálogo de las colecciones arqueológicas del Museo Nacional de Antropología. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City.
García Moll, Roberto, Daniel Juárez Cossio, Carmen María Pijoan Aguade, María Elena Salas Cuesta and Marcela Salas Cuesta(1991)Catálogo de entierros de San Luis Tlatilco, México, temporada IV. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City.
Sodi Miranda, Federica and Hugo Herrera Torres(1991)Estudio de los objetos arqueológicos de la cultura matlatzinca. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City.
Comment
I don’t think the above lists (incomplete as they are) need much comment. There can be little doubt that Felipe Solís was not only a leading scholar and museum curator, but he did more than anyone else to publish (and to promote the publishing by others) of museum collections. Why is that important? See my paper:
The title of this post is from a fascinating Forum in the latest issue of Near Eastern Archaeology, which explores the relationship between archaeologists and the TV media world. Why are archaeology programs on TV so bad? Whose fault is it? What can we do?
Eric Cline blames TV producers for not connecting with the best archaeologists, relying on fakes instead (by fake, I mean actors and others masquerading as archaeologists). If responsible archaeologists can get the attention of producers and directors, we can raise the level of discourse in TV archaeology.
Cline's ideas are countered by Neil Asher Silberman, who notes that "television is certainly not a forum for logical, abstract discussion. It is a delivery system for a rapid-fire succession of images that create stories meant to impress, frighten,arouse, or amuse." The blame lies with archaeologists for failing to rise above our potsherds and deliver the kind of non-technical storytelling that TV requires.
Cornelius Holtorf backs up Silberman's ideas, calling Cline's proposals elitist. "Before complaining that the public does not understand academic archaeology well enough, we should ask oursleves whether we actually understand the public well enough." Public archaeology is storytelling, and archaeologists should embrace this.
Cline closes by proposing a synthesis between the two positions argued in the previous sections. I find myself agreeing with most of the points made by all three commentators. Sometimes I think Cline is correct; we need to try to get more press for rigorous and authoritative archaeology. At other times I sympathize with Silberman and Holtorf—TV is entertainment. Period. Any archaeology that gets included should not be confused with scholarship.
Cline, Eric H., Neil Asher Silberman, and Cornelius J. Holtorf 2008 Forum: Archaeologists and the Media. Near Eastern Archaeology 71(3):172-179.
I just received the March 2009 issue of Latin American Antiquity, and here are a few yays and nays. The journal is thicker than usual, a good sign. The twelve papers are arranged into two sections, titled “Part 1: Themed Section on Technology Approaches” and “Part 2: Themed Section on Mesoamerica.” I can’t figure out what the phrase “technology approaches” means here. The section has four papers on bone chemistry analysis, an osteology paper, a paper on DNA analysis, and a paper on Maya lithics.
The second section has four papers on the Maya and one on another Mesoamerican region. One of the Maya papers is on lithics, like one of the papers in the other section. I looked in vain for a message from the Editor about the context or rationale for these puzzling special sections.
The journal also has a book review essay (on Olmec books), but no regular book reviews. I take this as further evidence for the existence of a book review crisis in New World archaeology.
Given my interest in promoting comparative analysis in archaeology (Smith 2009; statement on comparative archaeology), I was pleased to see Scott Speal’s (2009) paper on Maya chert tool production. Speal proposes “a new direction in Maya lithic studies with the goal of enhancing comparability of data on ancient economic structure through the use of standardized statistics that facilitate spatial analysis” (from the abstract, p. 91). (¡Way to go, Scott!) Several other papers in this issue also engage in explicit comparative analyses, including Chris Garraty’s paper on market exchange in Mesoamerica and Cecil Lewis’s paper on mtDNA in the southern Andes. Publication of this kind of comparative work is a very positive development.
Speal, C. Scott 2009 The Economic Geography of Chert Lithic Production in the Southern Maya Lowlands: A Comparative Examination of Early Stage Reduction Debris. Latin American Antiquity 20:91-119.
This blog contains information and opinions (mine) on professional publishing issues in archaeology. I am especially concerned with quality control, types of archaeological publication, and Open Access.
