Monday, December 21, 2009

Podcast: Interview on Open Access at ASU

A few months ago, two ASU faculty (Jane Maienschein and Claudia Mesch) and I taped an interview with Anali Perry of the University Library about Open Access. I guess I missed its broadcast (for Open Access week in October), but the 35-minute interview is available on the Library's web site.

This interview is probably most useful for scholars who are not very familiar with Open Access and are curious about its various manifestations, at ASU and beyond.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

White House solicits comments on Open Access

The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) of the White House in Washington is soliciting input on "Public Access to Federally Funded Research." What should the Executive branch policy be toward Open Access for research results? How should results get disseminated? Where should papers be posted? How should this work? There is a special OSTP blog set up to gather comments from researchers. The first stage of the process is to get input on Implementation (Dec 10 - 20); later stages will gather feedback on other aspects of the process.

I've put in my two cents. If you feel strongly about this, you should comment too. These are my comments (organized by the specific questions posed):

Which federal agencies: All federal agencies that fund research should have mandatory deposit policies.

Timing and Version:
• For the author’s final peer-reviewed manuscript: Deposit this immediately upon publication. As Stevan Harnad has pointed out many times, this version has the fewest legal barriers and will thus be the easiest to implement quickly.

• The publisher’s pdf: Deposit this after the publisher’s embargo period. Pressure should be brought to bear on publishers to reduce, or eliminate, embargos. But it is much more important to get a policy implemented quickly, and to have papers deposited in a timely fashion, than to get the pdf filed.

Locus: Deposit should be in the institutional repository of the author’s home institution. There are too many disciplines to use central repositories (particularly for the social sciences and humanities), and not all research is federally funded.

Mandatory: Yes, deposit should be mandatory, by both the funder and also by each university or sponsoring institution.

I now have two reasons to respect the White House on intellectual and professional grounds (apart from views about the President himself): (1) The OSTP blog on Open Access policies, and (2) the presence of Xavier de Souza Briggs in the White House Office of Management and Budget. Briggs is a major scholar of urban planning, focusing on housing and segregation, with a comparative interest in ancient cities (Briggs 2004 compares ancient Rome, medieval Cordoba, and modern Los Angeles in terms of cultural diversity). The OMB blog has some information on Briggs, who was recently awarded tenure at MIT.

Briggs, Xavier de Souza
2004 Civilization in Color: The Multicultural City in Three Millennia. City and Community 3:311-342.

Monday, December 14, 2009

Jr. Anthropological Archaeology - Quick Turnaround Time

I just got back a decision and reviews on a paper I submitted to the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology on November 4 (2009). I am flaggergasted - this is a turnaround time of 5.5 weeks! Amazing! I am used to journals in anthropology and archaeology taking many months to evaluate a manuscript. Well, those artifacts are hundreds or thousands of years old, so what difference do a few months make, one way or another?

A couple of years ago, a manuscript of mine took almost two years to review by a regional journal that will go unnamed (they lost the reviews, and I had to send the journal a copy of one review whose author had sent me a copy of their review as a courtesy!). A colleague just published an important paper in a somewhat obscure journal because they could review it right away--after Current Anthropology sat on the manuscript for nearly a year! After bugging a European colleague for along time that he should publish a paper in English in a U.S. journal, he finally submitted a manuscript, and the review process took over a year!

So, a big hat's off to the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. Not only did they get me a reply very quickly, but their perceptive reviewers zeroed in on three issues that I thought might be problematic but, but decided (for various reasons) to skim over without elaboration. My paper is a "revise and resubmit," and I will be able to get the revision done and submitted in a shorter total time (from initial submission) than most archaeology journals take to get a single round of reviews completed.

Friday, December 11, 2009

A reason to post your papers on your website

When you post your papers online, people download them. And they presumably read them (or at least they probably look at them). I post my papers in three places; this is an experiment to see which seems to work the best. Those locations have a priority in terms of how many papers are posted, and I think this translates into a hierarchy of how much these three locations are used (but I only have data on locations # 2 and 3).

Location 1 is the publications list on my own website. This has been around the longest and it has all of my recent papers and many of my older ones. I don't have any data on downloads or views, however.

Location 2 is my page on the Selected Works site. I have talked about Selected Works there. And I have remarked on the fact that my Spanish-language papers are downloaded (from that site) more more frequently than my English-language papers here. Below I show my current download data for Selected Works. These data provide the "reason to post your papers" from the title of this entry (and they confirm my earlier post about Spanish language papers).

Location 3 is Academia.edu. This is an academic networking site. There doesn't seem to be much social networking going on (which is good, in my mind), but it does let you find other scholars with similar interests. More to the point here, you can post your papers, a CV, etc. This may be the easiest place for grad students to make a simple web page, post some papers and list your research interests. One advantage of this site is that they are well positioned in Google searches. These data are tracked under "keywords." For example, in the past year or so, over 600 Google searches have found my papers on Academia.edu, and you can look at the actual search terms people have used. I haven't been the target of many searches looking for "brilliant scholarship on the Aztecs" or "ground-breaking ideas on ancient cities;" oh well. In fact, the vast majority are looking for information on V. Gordon Childe and the Urban Revolution, and after I posted my recent paper on this topic I started getting lots of Google hits (there must be many college assignments on the Urban Revolution this year).

Below are my download data from Selected Works, current as of today:

Paper Downloads
Date Posted
La fundación de los capitales de las ciudades-estado aztecas: la recreación ideológico de Tollan 601

8/12/08
El imperio de la triple alianza (Tenochtitlan, Texcoco y Tlacopan) en el siglo XXI 502

8/4/08
V. Gordon Childe and the Urban Revolution: An Historical Perspective on a Revolution in Urban Studies 345

6/19/09
Las ofrendas de Calixtlahuaca 303

7/9/08
Foreward: Aztec Figurine Studies 202

8/4/08
La cerámica posclásica de Morelos 170

7/8/08
The Earliest Cities 168

7/9/08
La fundación de las ciudades en el mundo antiguo: revisión de conceptos 167

8/4/08
The Aztec Empire 151

2/17/09
Did the Maya Build Architectural Cosmograms? 123

7/9/08
City Planning: Aztec City Planning 119

7/8/08
Sources of Imported Obsidian at Postclassic Sites in the Yautepec Valley, Morelos: A Characterization Study Using XRF and INAA 119

7/8/08
A Quarter-Century of Aztec Studies 110

7/9/08
Aztec Feasts, Rituals, and Markets: Political Uses of Ceramic Vessels in a Commercial Economy 106

8/28/08
How do Archaeologists Compare Early States? Book Review Essay on Bruce Trigger and Adam T. Smith 96

7/8/08
The Archaeological Study of Empires and Imperialism in Prehispanic Central Mexico 95

7/9/08
Can we Read Cosmology from Maya City Plans? Comment on Ashmore and Sabloff 74

8/20/08
Form and Meaning in the Earliest Cities: A New Approach to Ancient Urban Planning 70

7/8/08
Domestic Ritual at Aztec Provincial Sites in Morelos 66

8/20/08
Los hogares de Morelos en el sistema mundial mesoamericano posclásico 65

8/28/08
Tula and Chichén Itzá: Are We Asking the Right Questions? 63

7/8/08
Comercio postclásico en la cerámica decorada: Malinalco, Toluca, Guerrero y Morelos 58

7/9/08
Review of: Ancient Middle Niger: Urbanism and the Self-Organizing Landscape , by Roderick J. McIntosh 57

8/4/08
City Size in Late Postclassic Mesoamerica 55

7/9/08
Editorial: Just How Comparative is Comparative Urban Geography?: A Perspective from Archaeology 53

2/5/09
Life in the Provinces of the Aztec Empires 53

8/12/08
New World States and Empires: Economic and Social Organization 52

7/9/08
The Aztec Empire and the Mesoamerican World system 50

8/20/08
The Aztec World of Gary Jennings 50

8/28/08
The Archaeology of Ancient State Economies 42

7/8/08
New World States and Empires: Politics, Religion, and Urbanism 33

7/9/08
Aztec City-States 32

8/20/08
Postclassic Ceramics from the Toluca Valley in U.S. Museums: The Bauer and Blake Collections 24

8/28/08
Review of: The Tenochca Empire of Central Mexico, by Pedro Carrasco 22

8/4/08
Review of The Ancient City, edited by Joyce Marcus and Jeremy Sabloff 19

11/20/09
Xoo-Phase Ceramics from Oaxaca Found at Calixtlahuaca in Central Mexico 18

8/12/08
Economies and Polities in Aztec-period Morelos: Ethnohistoric Introduction 13

7/9/09

So, if you want people to see, read, and cite your papers, then you should self-archive someplace. This does not necessarily translate directly into citations; my citation data on Google Scholar or in the Thomson/ISI database are quite a bit lower, typically by an order or magnitude, than these figures. Nevertheless, there is probably in indirect relationship; more downloads probably lead to more citations in the long run (there are probably data on this somewhere).
\

Monday, November 30, 2009

Track your citation data with "Tenurometer" (maybe)

According to "Tenurometer," a new site that provides citation data for researchers, my publications are more widely cited than those of Colin Renfew or Kent Flannery! Wow, what an ego-boost! Closer examination, however suggests that I am being attributed publications by many authors named "ME Smith," in many disciplines. Oh well. I wonder if I can fool my dean with these "data." Tenurometer uses citation data from Google Scholar. When searching for my own publications on Tenurometer, I can isolate them without much difficulty (using search terms, and then manually weeding out papers from other ME Smiths). But when the program constructs comparisons within disciplines, it must take ALL the ME Smith papers. When my citation data seemed too high, I added Renfrew and Flannery, and found that I was ahead of those guys! Oh well, my proper place in the citations hierarchy should be quite a bit lower.

If you want to try this program, here is part of the email that I got through Steven Harnad's Open Access listserv:

Dear colleagues,

Please forgive the wide distribution of this announcement. We write to introduce a new social tool to facilitate citation analysis and help evaluate the impact of an author's publications:

http://tenurometer.indiana.edu/

Tenurometer provides a smart interface to make Google Scholar more powerful, convenient, and easy to use. Unlike Publish or Perish, Tenurometer is not a standalone application; it is a browser extension, so it can be used on any computer with a Firefox browser.

There is a twist. By using Tenurometer you help tag authors and contribute to a social database of annotations, associating authors, papers, and disciplines. We plan to make this data publicly available for research purposes. All you do is use Tenurometer for your own purposes, and submit one or more discipline tags when you query.

Statistics from the annotations are available on the Tenurometer website.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Academic "cold calls"

"Cold calls" are telephone solicitations for sales that are made "cold," without prior contacts or signs of interest from the consumer. This week I have gotten 2 cold calls soliciting academic work, which is surreal. The latest was this email:

Dear Michael E. Smith
You are invited to submit articles to the Journal of Biomedical Science and Engineering (JBiSE, ISSN Print: 1937-6871, ISSN Online: 1937-688X).
JBiSE, publishes research and review articles in all important aspects of biology. medicine, engineering, and their intersection. Accepted papers will immediately appear online followed by printed hard copy, which will be sent to over 200 scientific libraries around the world.

Do the editors of this journal really think messages to people outside of their discipline will be productive? Maybe this is just another case of the "Michael Smith" confusion (I did NOT ride the winning horse at the Kentucky Derby a few years ago, I am NOT a Christian singer, I did NOT write the book "How to Teach Your Dog to Eliminate on Command," and so on.). There is a list of this and other books by Michael Smith that I did not write. Or maybe this is just a blanket email, soliciting papers for a journal with high author fees hoping to increase their revenues.

The second example was a true cold call. Someone called and said they worked for a publishing company (that I hadn't heard of) and asked if I had any book manuscripts I wanted to submit. I briefly considered assembling a big batch of old email text, giving it a clever postmodern title, and sending it off to see what would happen. But that would be too much work. Of course I thought of several clever replies as soon as I hung up. But I am amazed that someone thinks this kind of phone solicitation makes economic sense.

These events serve to confirm my confusion about some areas of the publishing business these days.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Open Access again

There is a nice entry on Open Access on the blog of the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development. It starts out:

The only purpose of open access to research literature is to provide the widest possible distribution of the latest research findings to the global community and to enable the development of new knowledge for the benefit of mankind.

The EPT does good work:

The EPT is a UK registered charitable trust, the aims of which are to support scholarly publishing in the developing world and to facilitate access to research information, particularly through open access. Its web address is http://www.epublishingtrust.org.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Elinor Ostrom and archaeology

A chance comment from a colleague made me think again about the relevance of Nobel-winner Elinor Ostrom’s research for archaeology. (See my earlier post). I think her work has great potential to contribute to the archaeological analysis of ancient economic and political dynamics, but that potential is only starting to be realized. So here are a few brief thoughts on the matter, semi-random attempts to justify that opinion.

1. Archaeologists are starting to use collection action theory.

I have said elsewhere that recent research by Blanton and Fargher is very important and will be influential in changing the direction of archaeological studies of ancient state systems:

Blanton, Richard E. and Lane F. Fargher (2008) Collective Action in the Formation of Pre-Modern States. Springer, New York.

Blanton, Richard E. and Lane F. Fargher (2009) Collective Action in the Evolution of Pre-Modern States. Social Evolution and History 8(2):133-166. ***IF you can’t afford the book, try this paper***

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.

2. Archaeologists are starting to look at common pool resource theory.

A few southwesternists have published in this area. There are many more applications in the literature on hunter-gatherers, but I don’t know that literature. A quick search on Google Scholar will find them, I’m sure.

Bayman, James M. and Alan P. Sullivan, III (2008) Property, Identity, and Macroeconomy in the Prehispanic Southwest. American Anthropologist 110(1):6-20.

Kohler, Timothy A. (1992) Field Houses, Villages, and the Tragedy of the Commons in the Early Northern Anasazi Southwest. American Antiquity 57:617-635.

3. Elinor Ostrom has co-authored papers with some archaeologists:

Liu, Jianguo, Thomas Dietz, Stephen R. Carpenter, Carl Folke, Marina Alberti, Charles L. Redman, Stephen H. Schneider, Elinor Ostrom, Alice N. Pell, Jane Lubchenco, William W. Taylor, Zhiyun Ouyang, Peter Deadman, Timothy Kratz and William Provencher (2007) Coupled Human and Natural Systems. Ambio 36:639-649.

Young, Oran R., Frans Berkhout, Gilberto C. Gallopin, Marco A. Janssen, Elinor Ostrom and Sander van der Leeuw (2006) The Globalization of Socio-Ecological Systems: An Agenda for Scientific Research. Global Environmental Change 16:304-316.

4. Other members of her Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at ASU have published papers using archaeological data:

Anderies, John M. (2006) Robustness, Institutions, and Large-Scale Change in Social-Ecological Systems: The Hohokam of the Phoenix Basin. Journal of Institutional Economics 2:133-155.

Anderies, John M., Ben A. Nelson and Ann P. Kinzig (2008) Analyzing the Impact of Agave Cultivation on Famine Risk in Arid Pre-Hispanic Northern Mexico. Human Ecology 36:409-422.

Janssen, Marco A., Timothy A. Kohler and Marten Scheffer (2003) Sunk-Cost Effects and Vulnerability to Collapse in Ancient Societies. Current Anthropology 44:722-728.

Janssen, Marco A. and Marten Scheffer (2004) Overexploitation of Renewable Resources by Ancient Societies, and the Role of Sunk-Cost Effects. Ecology and Society 9(1):article 6 (online).

5. Finally, here is my own personal Kevin-Bacon-linkage to Ostrom:

A. Ostrom has co-published several papers with Abby York (of CSID). For example:

Evans, Tom P., Abigail M. York and Elinor Ostrom (2008) Insitutional Dynamics, Spatial Organization, and Landscape Change. In Political Economies of Landscape Change: Places of Integrative Power, edited by James L. Westcoat, Jr. and Douglas M. Johnston, pp. 111-129. Springer, New York.

B. I am working on a multi-author paper with Abby (not yet published, though):

York, Abigail, Christopher Boone, George L. Cowgill, Sharon L. Harlan, Juliana Novic, Michael E. Smith, Benjamin Stanley and Barbara L. Stark (2009) Ethnic and Class-Based Clustering Through the Ages: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Urban Social Patterns. (paper in preparation).

So, if you are not yet tempted to look at the work of Elinor Ostrom, then I give up!




1

Thursday, November 5, 2009

New journal: "Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences"

I have just seen a new journal, "Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences." This is published by Springer, under their heading of "Earth Sciences." Although this is a commercial journal that will have toll access, they are offering free access for a month. Volume 1, issue 3 is now available. The journal's website says:

"Presents the latest scientific methodologies in archaeological research

Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences covers the full spectrum of natural scientific methods with an emphasis on the archaeological contexts and the questions being studied. It bridges the gap between archaeologists and natural scientists providing a forum to encourage the continued integration of scientific methodologies in archaeological research.

Coverage in the journal includes: archaeology, geology/geophysical prospection, geoarchaeology, geochronology, palaeoanthropology, archaeozoology and archaeobotany, genetics and other biomolecules, material analysis and conservation science.

Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences is endorsed by the German Society of Natural Scientific Archaeology and Archaeometry (GNAA), the Hellenic Society for Archaeometry (HSC) and the Association of Italian Archaeometrists (AIAr)."

I wonder what is "Anthropological" about the journal, except perhaps a way to distinguish its name from the Journal of Archaeological Science (JAS). The new journal participates in Springer's "Open Choice" program. Authors can pay to have their articles made available without charge on the journal's website for only $3,000 (US dollars). Wow, what a bargain.

This new journal is one sign that the field of archaeological science has become a major growth area in archaeological journal publishing. JAS now publishes twelve issues per year; Archaeometry is still going strong, and various other more specialized journals are flourishing. Although I have no data about this, my impression is that the number of journal pages devoted to topics in archaeological science may be increasing more rapidly than other domains of archaeology such as theory and regional coverage.

Given the involvement of natural scientists in this area, with their higher research funding levels than most field projects, one would think that they could figure out how to develop open access journals to promote wider distribution of the research. Or perhaps an organization in this area could work on an institutional repository for archiving published papers.

I was going to make a snide remark about the cost of subscription for the new journal, but I can't find any information on their website. A few years ago Springer evidently decided that they didn't want individuals to subscribe to their journals anymore, so they jacked up subscription rates tremendously; that was when I cancelled my subscriptions to the Jr. Arch. Research and Jr. Arch Method & Theory. I certainly don't understanding journal finances these days. Most university libraries will probably not be able to afford the new journal, although perhaps they will bundle it with other titles (the current commercial journal strategy).

But increasing the supply of published peer-reviewed articles in archaeology is a good thing, and I wish the new journal luck.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

I have a Nobel Prize winner as a colleague

A few weeks, Elinor (“Lin”) Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Science magazine had a short article about this, but it failed to mention that she has an appointment as Research Professor at Arizona State University. In fact, her appointment is in my program (the School of Human Evolution & Social Change); she is my departmental colleague. Wow, who would have thought that an anthropology program would be the home of a Nobel Prize winner.

I guess I understand why Science only mentioned her affiliation with Indiana University. That is her primary academic affiliation, and she has been at IU her whole career. But in 2006 Lin Ostrom was given a part-time appointment at ASU, in our unit. She founded the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity (CSID), which is the home for faculty from various disciplines (including anthropology) who do very interesting research on common-pool resources, collective action, cooperation, resilience, urbanism, and other topics. They use a diversity of methods, from ethnography to economic games to agent-based modeling (see bibliography below).

The research of Lin Ostrom and the people in CSID is interesting and important, although archaeologists are only starting to explore this realm. In fact, some of these scholars are now working with archaeological data, and it’s high time that the rest of us get moving on some of these topics. Here are a small number of their recent publications.

Elinor Ostrom:

Liu, Jianguo, Thomas Dietz, Stephen R. Carpenter, Carl Folke, Marina Alberti, Charles L. Redman, Stephen H. Schneider, Elinor Ostrom, Alice N. Pell, Jane Lubchenco, William W. Taylor, Zhiyun Ouyang, Peter Deadman, Timothy Kratz and William Provencher (2007) Coupled Human and Natural Systems. Ambio 36:639-649.

Ostrom, Elinor (2007) Collective Action Theory. In Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics, edited by Charles Boix and Susan C. Stokes, pp. 186-208. Oxford University Press, New York.

Ostrom, Elinor (2009) A General Framework for Analyzing Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems. Science 325:419-422.

Ostrom, Elinor (2009) What is Social Capital? In Social Capital: Reaching Out, Reaching In, edited by Viva Bartkus and James Davis, pp. 17-38. Edward Elgar, Northampton, MA.

CSDI Faculty:

Anderies, John M. (2006) Robustness, Institutions, and Large-Scale Change in Social-Ecological Systems: The Hohokam of the Phoenix Basin. Journal of Institutional Economics 2:133-155.

Anderies, John M., Marco A. Janssen and Elinor Ostrom (2004) A Framework to Analyze the Robustness of Socio-Ecological Systems from an Institutional Perspective. Ecology and Society 9(1):article 18 (online).

Janssen, Marco A., John M. Anderies and Elinor Ostrom (2007) Robustness of Social-Ecological Systems of Spatial and Temporal Variability. Society and Natural Resources 20:307-322.

Janssen, Marco A., Timothy A. Kohler and Marten Scheffer (2003) Sunk-Cost Effects and Vulnerability to Collapse in Ancient Societies. Current Anthropology 44:722-728.

Janssen, Marco A. and Marten Scheffer (2004) Overexploitation of Renewable Resources by Ancient Societies, and the Role of Sunk-Cost Effects. Ecology and Society 9(1):article 6 (online).

Munroe, Darla K., Cynthia Croissant and Abigail York (2005) Land Use Policy and Landscape Fragmentation in an Urbanizing Region: Assessing the Impact of zoning. Applied Geography 25:121-141.

Ostrom, Elinor, Marco A. Janssen and John M. Anderies (2007) Going Beyond Panaceas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104:15176-15178.

Wutich, Amber and Kethleen Ragsdale (2008) Water Insecurity and Emotional Distress: Coping with Supply, Access, and Seasonal Variabilitiy of Water in a Bolivian Squatter Settlement. Social Science and Medicine 67:2116-2125.

Young, Oran R., Frans Berkhout, Gilberto C. Gallopin, Marco A. Janssen, Elinor Ostrom and Sander van der Leeuw (2006) The Globalization of Socio-Ecological Systems: An Agenda for Scientific Research. Global Environmental Change 16:304-316.

If these papers are not familiar to you, I suggest looking at some of them.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

AAA looks at journal costs

In an article in the October 2009 Anthropology News, Oona Schmid discusses some of the serious issues surrounding the costs of journal publishing by the American Anthropological Association ("The Price of Free: An Invitation to Engage in the Future of the AAA's Publishing Program," Anthropology News, October 2009, pp. 19-20). If this is really an "invitation" to "engage you as readers" in discussion of this issue, one would think there would be a link to a website for online discussion. Oh well. This lack is symptomatic of the AAA's conservate and unimaginative approach to publications and open access. Two quick observations:

(1) If the AAA wants to distribute intellectual content without going broke, its journals should give up their print versions and move to an electonic-only format. The essence of academic journals is the peer review process. It is nice to have a nice old-fashioned book to hold in our grubby paws, but it is not really necessary to continue a scientific peer-reviewed publishing program. I didn't see anything in Schmid's column to suggest that the AAA might be considering such an option.

(2) One of the most effective ways the AAA could promote widespread distribution of peer-reviewed scholarship would be to set up an institutional repository for professional anthropological articles. This route of "Green Open Access" is the easiest and quickest way to establish open access of peer-reviewed scholarship (see my posts on Open Access, or anything written by Steven Harnad). This is a separate issue from journal finances, but it goes to the heart of the very reason scholars publish scholarly articles at all, and to the heart of the professional responsibilities of the AAA

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

It's Open Access Week - Here is a great link

This passage is from Jason Baird Jackson's blog:

"Last year, did you get paid nothing to work hard for a multinational corporation with reported revenues of over 1 billion dollars in 2008? [2]

If you have (1) done peer-reviews for, (2) submitted an article to, (3) written a book or media review for, or (4) taken on the editorship of a scholarly journal published by giant firms such as Springer, Reed Elisevier, or Wiley, then you belong to a very large group of very well-educated people whose unpaid labor has helped make these firms very profitable. Their profitability in turn has positioned them to work vigorously against the interests of (1) university presses and other not-for-profit publishers in the public interest, (2) libraries at all levels, (3) university and college students, (4) scholars themselves, and (5) particular and general publics with a need to consult the scholarly record.

I am not willing to freely give my labor to large multinational corporations whose interests align with their shareholders but that are antagonistic to my own."

You can read the whole thing here.

Jackson urges scholars like you and me to take these five steps:

  • "Choose not to submit scholarly journal articles or other works to publications owned by for-profit firms.
  • Say no, when asked to undertake peer-review work on a book or article manuscript that has been submitted for publication by a for-profit publisher or a journal under the control of a commercial publisher.
  • Do not seek or accept the editorship of a journal owned or under the control of a commercial publisher.
  • Do not take on the role of series editor for a book series being published by a for-profit publisher.
  • Turn down invitations to join the editorial boards of commercially published journals or book series."
This is a great post, it echoes my sentiments pretty closely.

*** NEVERTHELESS *** I am now editing my initial post here, curbing my enthusiasm somewhat, and arguing that readers should consult Steven Harnad's comment below. While I can feel indignant about commercial publishers, what is really needed is the development of institutional repositories by universities and professional organizations. We need to post our publications on the internet, and then it matters much less what happens to commercial publishers or OA journals. The key point is to make our scholarly output available on the internet, and it is much easier and faster to post one's publications than to wait around for big corporations to change their ways to please scholars.

Monday, October 19, 2009

Why is it hard to find archaeological information using standard databases?


I have always been struck with the difficulties in finding archaeological information in standard bibliographic databases. I first had this impression in graduate school, when I worked in the Reference Department of the University of Illinois Library. Other fields seemed to be easy to research in the standard printed catalogs and indexes, but archaeology (and anthropology generally) slipped through the cracks between the humanities, social science, and natural science bibliographies. At my former university, faculty personnel cases were required to include bibliometric data (citation counts and the like), and we had some standard boilerplate text to explain why anthropology is poorly served in the standard databases. We also do poorly in journal impact factors and citation data today.

I just came across a recent paper that explores the difficulties of finding archaeological citations in the standard online bibliographic databases:

Tyler, David, Yang Xu, and Emily Dust Nimsakont

2009 Unearthing Archaeolgy: A Study of the Recent Coverage of Selected English-Language Archaeology Journals by Multi-Subject Indexes and by Anthropological Literature. Behavioral and Social Science Librarian 28:100-144.

The authors document the situation: archaeology (and anthropology) are poorly served in the standard multi-subject databases. Anthropological Literature is the best source for archaeological searching, but it lacks key publications that would make it a comprehensive resource.

These are the reasons identified by the authors for the difficulties in archaeological searching. See the original paper for full citations to a number of other relevant publications.

1. Anthropology and archaeology are very diverse fields.

  • In the words of one library research paper cited by the authors, these fields are “hopelessly diffuse.”
  • “Xia took note that archaeologists’ interests are not only broad where topics are concerned, but where techniques and methodologies are concerned, as well, and he noted that archaeologists borrow readily and eclectically approaches from numerous related fields” (Xia 2006:271).

2. It is difficult to bound the field of archaeology.

  • “Since there does not seem to be any way to predict what anthropologists and archaeologists might want to research or how they will go about researching a subject, there consequently does not seem to be any way to predict what resources they might want. As Bower and his team learned during the course of their studies of archaeologists’ use of resources, the term “‘core’ is a meaningless concept” (148). Bower also learned that the currency of resources is irrelevant as well: “It was also pointed out time and time again that the age of a journal issue was irrelevant, and that the 1770 issue of Archaeologia was just as important to some researchers as the latest issue of Industrial Archaeology Review was to others” (148).”

3. The lengthy history of the field:

  • “the lengthy history of the field(s) and from the irregularity of their information collection and publication practices: the anthropology/archaeology literature is widely scattered, has often been poorly collected and preserved, and has been published in a wide variety of languages.” (p.103)

4. The lack of a comprehensive index or catalog of published literature in archaeology.

5. The lack of an authoritative and consistent terminology to use to index and catalog the field.

6. The internet has produced considerable false and misleading information in archaeology:

  • Sturges and Griffin have further noted that archaeology is a subject like health, politics, business and law, that is particularly susceptible to misinformation. The popular appeal of the subject, coupled with the complexity of the issues, allows those with an agenda other than the discovery of objective truth to spin seductive webs of fantasy and selective presentation of data. (2003, 222)

7. Resistance to change in these factors by individual archaeologists.

  • I will refrain from snide remarks here, but see their discussion for documentation of “the fields’ practitioners’ all too human tendency to create difficulties for themselves.” (p.105).

Tyler, David, Yang Xu, and Emily Dust Nimsakont

2009 Unearthing Archaeolgy: A Study of the Recent Coverage of Selected English-Language Archaeology Journals by Multi-Subject Indexes and by Anthropological Literature. Behavioral and Social Science Librarian 28:100-144.

Xia, Jingfeng

2006 Electronic Publishing in Archaeology. Journal of Scholarly Publishing 37(4):online publication.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Why would publishers reprint outdated textbooks??

I may have been too hasty when I praised Left Coast Press for reprinting some out-of-print archaeology books from Academic Press. While some of these books are still valuable today, I can't see why whey would reprint an out-of-date textbook in Mesoamerican archaeology. Muriel Porter Weaver's The Aztecs, Maya, and their Predecessors went through three editions up through 1993, and it was the standard textbook during its time. But since 1993 the field has expanded greatly, there is an explosion of new materials and interpretations, and our understanding of ancient Mesoamerican has shifted in many ways.

In 2004, Susan Evans published Ancient Mexico and Central America, an authoritative, up-t0-date, and VERY well illstrated textbook (Thames and Hudson). This immediately became the basic textbook in the field, and it has remained so. A second edition appeared in 2008. So who would want to read Weaver's 1993 textbook today? No responsible instructor would assign this book (especially given its price tag, $70).

Well, I guess this isn't as bad as Dover reprinting Spinden's 1922 textbook (Ancient Civilizations of Mexico and Central America) in 1999. You would think that someone at Dover would realize that the field had changed in 77 years. The historical value of Spinden's text is not particularly high, either.

Basically, I have no idea why publishers would reprint outdated textbooks. But then if some publishers will take Wikipedia articles about ancient Egypt, put them into book format, and sell it on Amazon.com, I guess republishing an outdated textbook doesn't sound quite so bad.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

How to find a publisher for your book manuscript

It seems that I have had a bunch of requests lately for advice on finding a publisher for academic books in archaeology. In most cases these are young scholars, recent PhDs, and in many cases the book in question is or will be based on a dissertation.


My main advice is to buy and read Beth Luey’s book, Handbook for Academic Authors, Cambridge University Press. The 5th edition just came out this year (2009), although I still have the 3rd edition (oops, time to upgrade). This book is essential for academic authors, with all sorts of useful advice. Is your publisher offering a fair deal on royalties? Should I think about writing a textbook? How should I handle nasty reviews from a journal on my brilliant manuscript? What are the pitfalls of trying to publish my dissertation as a book?


My second piece of advice is to talk to your colleagues and mentors about your situation. They will know your work and have a good idea about publishing formats and venues.


Here are some suggestions, based on my own experiences and on Luey’s book.

(1) Think hard about whether your dissertation really needs to be published as a book. Maybe you are better off publishing several good journal articles (that’s what I did).

(2) Spend some time investigating publishers. Luey divides publishers into several groups. Of these, the most relevant for young scholars and rewritten dissertations are:

  • University presses (generally the best bet for dissertations)
  • Commercial scholarly publishers (there is wide variation here)
  • Technical monograph series
  • Vanity presses and other rip-off commercial presses. See Nova Publishers here, or perhaps VDM Verlag Dr. Mueller (thanks to Anastasia Tsaliki for this example). For a really, really bad rip-off publisher, see this post.

(3) It is often a good idea to talk to an editor from one of the relevant presses, perhaps at a professional meeting or by email. This can give you an idea of what they might be looking for.


(4) Prepare a good prospectus for submission. Each press has slightly different requirements for a prospectus, but most have these components:


  • A description of the book, including a table of contents
  • Information on the target audience
  • A list or discussion of possible competing titles
  • Information on the current status of the manuscript and a projected timetable.
  • A copy of your CV
  • A writing sample

If you want to see a less formal description of a book prospectus, see the “Series Description Document” on my web page for the book series, “Ancient Cities of the New World.” Prepare the prospectus in correct format for each relevant publisher, and send it off to as many publishers as you want. In our case, authors communicate with one of the series editors (me, Marilyn Masson, and John Janusek) and submit the prospectus to us. We often suggest some revisions to the author, and then if we think the proposed book is appropriate, we forward it, with our evaluation and recommendation to the press. In most cases, however, you will be submitting the prospectus directly to an acquisitions editor at the press.

Friday, October 9, 2009

Nova Scientific Publishers again

Since my post of May 15, 2009, "Nova Publishers" - legitimate or bogus?", I have gotten several emails with more concerns and problems with this press. The most relevant and useful, from David Bade, includes a link to an online article of his about Nova Publishers, called

The Content of Journals Published by Nova Science Publishers, Inc.: Political History and Culture of Russia and Current Politics and Economics of Russia, Eastern and Central Europe.

He also referenced the discussion page of the entry for Nova Publishers on Wikipedia. Very interesting, indeed! I quote the end of his email to me:

"Don’t let your students get involved!"

Friday, August 21, 2009

The book review crisis in Latin American archaeology

I have made the claim several times in this blog that there is a crisis in publishing book reviews in New World archaeology. I devoted a post to this in 2008. (for more posts on the topic, check the index at the right under "book reviews"). Here I limit the scope to Latin American archaeology, where there are two major journals in English: Latin American Antiquity and Ancient Mesoamerica. Frustrated by the presence of only 5 book reviews in the last 2 issues of Latin American Antiquity combined, I tallied the number of reviews per year for the journal, starting in 2007. Here are the data:


Now, here are the counts for book reviews in the other major journal in Latin American archaeology, Ancient Mesoamerica:

Oops, I forgot, AM does not publish book reviews.

Book reviews are important for social science and humanities disciplines for a number of reasons:

(1) They publicize new books and let readers know what they are about.

(2) The positive and negative evaluations in book reviews are a crucial part of quality control.

(3) Book reviews can provide insight into the current status of the discipline, not only through their themes and topics, but by the contextualization provided in a good review. (What do I mean by a good review? Click here)

I hope the book review situation is better for areas outside of Latin American archaeology, but I don't have any data. In my mind, the shortage of book reviews in Latin American archaeology constitutes a crisis in scholarly publishing, and it is harmful to the advancement of the discipline.

Friday, August 14, 2009

Legion Of Terra-Cotta Mouseketeers Found Beneath Disney World

Click here to read about an amazing breakthrough in Disney archaeology.

Below is a summary of the stratigraphy of this amazing find.

Friday, August 7, 2009

Three positive developments in archaeological publishing

Here are several recent positive developments in archaeological publishing (not counting the paper I just had accepted by CAJ):

(1) Left Coast Press has bought out the old archaeology list from Academic Press and is re-issuing some classic books with new introductions. The following is from Left Coast Press:

Having just obtained much of the old Academic Press archaeology list, we are re-releasing them, many in paperback for the first time and all a lot cheaper than they've been in recent years. In addition, several of these titles have been updated.

Kent Flannery's The Early Mesoamerican Village, one of the classic works of archaeology, is back in print with a new foreword by Jerry Sabloff.

Flannery has also provided a new Foreword for his volume Guila Naquitz with recent radiocarbon data and a reassessment of some of the original claims.

There will be recent reflections on Debating Archaeology from Lew Binford when we release it this summer.

The monumental Histories of Maize book will be accompanied by a paperback abridgement containing the chapters relevant to Mesoamerican archaeology. And new edition is expected soon of George Frison's high plains textbook.

For question, please contact Caryn M. Berg at: archaeology@lcoastpress.com

These and other old Academic Press books were important contributions to archaeology (in spite of awful indexes and ridiculously expensive prices), and this is a very nice development

(2) Latin American Antiquity has finally abandoned its policy of not publishing more than one paper by a given author within a three-year period. I know of at least one good paper, accepted by LAA, whose author withdrew the paper and published it (quickly) in another top journal when informed that LAA was going to sit on the manuscript for three years to comply with this very bad policy (well, LAA didn’t use the phrase “very bad policy;” that is my own interpretation). That policy said, in effect, that spreading authorship around among archaeologists was more important than publishing quality work in a timely fashion. It was a wrong-headed policy from the start. When I took on the Book Review Editor position for LAA a number of years ago, someone mentioned this policy, suggesting to me that it applied to book reviews as well as articles. I replied that I had no intention of following any such practice while I ran the book reviews. In my mind, quality should be the first criterion for publishing policy.

(3) JSTOR is thinking about increasing its coverage of archaeology journals. I can’t say much about this now. A colleague was contacted about this by JSTOR, and this person asked some of us for suggestions of important journals not included yet in JSTOR.

Monday, August 3, 2009

“Americanist Archaeology” is slighted in American Anthropologist

I just read an odd article in American Anthropologist by B. Sunday Eiselt called “Americanist Archaeologies: 2008 in Review” (Eiselt 2009). I use the term “odd” because two aspects of the article conflict with the apparent goal of the paper (to review major developments in Americanist archaeology or “archaeologies”). First, the topical coverage, which focuses on the themes of conflict, catastrophe and collaboration, captures only a very small portion of published research in Americanist archaeology. Second, much of the literature reviewed is written by Europeans about areas outside of the Americas. As an Americanist archaeologist I feel that research in this domain has been slighted by the biased coverage in this review article.


The paper is part of a new series in American Anthropologist called “The Year in Review.” These are short articles intended to review “what happened in a particular subfield of anthropology” in 2008 (Editor’s introduction, page 132). This is a worthy addition to the journal, and such papers could be very useful for keeping up with different parts of the discipline of anthropology.


But just what is “Americanist archaeology”? The author does not define this term anywhere in the paper, but she does cite Robert Dunnell’s series of articles that reviewed “Americanist archaeology” for an Old World archaeological audience in the American Journal of Anthropology in the 1980s. In the first of that series, Dunnell defined the scope of Americanist archaeology as “the kind of archaeology that has developed in association with anthropology in North America (Dunnell 1979:437). In subsequent works by Dunnell and others, the phrase Americanist archaeology was used to refer to theoretical work done by North American anthropological archaeologists (e.g., Dunnell 1986; Lyman and O'Brien 2001, 2004).


In fact, there is a much older and far more widespread usage of the term Americanist archaeology that includes all archaeology done on the American continents. This is part of the field of “Americanist” scholarship. The International Congress of Americanists (“ICA”) was established in 1875 in Nancy, France. Every three years scholars from around the world gather to discuss a variety of research themes focused on the American continents (Comas 1974). The 53rd ICA was held two weeks ago in Mexico City, with an attendance in the thousands. For most of us who work in Latin America, this is the usage that comes to mind when we hear the phrase Americanist archaeology. (See also the Journal de la Société des Américanistes, published in Paris since 1896). In comparison, Dunnell’s usage is parochial (only theory in North American anthropology departments), and Eiselt’s usage is bizarre.


Eiselt presents tables tallying peer-reviewed articles in 2008 by topic and by approach. Such data can be useful for getting the pulse of research in a field. But since no information is given on the source of the data (which journals were surveyed? what criteria were used to identify “Americanist” papers?), the tables are neither scholarly nor helpful. Then the review launches into the three themes (conflict, catastrophe, and collaboration). Although the material covered under each heading is interesting, these sections reflect poorly the content of the literature in Americanist archaeology. The most biased section is “conflict,” the bulk of which is devoted to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In what sense is this war the focus of research and publishing in Americanist archaeology? There is a big current literature on warfare, imperialism, personal violence, and other themes of conflict in Americanist archaeology of the precontact period, but that literature is not even hinted at in Eiselt’s paper.


Note 1 to this article (p.143) states that “The use of this term [the word referenced with the note is “abroad”] in no way implies that the current research cited in this document is specifically Americanist or may be claimed by U.S. approaches or traditions.” Huh????? Doesn’t the phrase “Americanist archaeologies” in the title mean that the paper reviews Americanist research? I guess note 1 excuses the focus on the Iraq war, but it leaves me puzzled about just what is meant by the term Americanist. I doubt the scholars from all over the world who attended the 53rd ICA two weeks ago would be happy with the content of this article as a reflection of their collective research activity. And I would guess that Dunnell, Lyman, and O’Brien would not think that their concept of Americanist archaeology is well served either.


One part of me is inclined to ignore these difficulties of coverage and definition. People can write what they want, and if the title and goal of the paper were different I would have few objections. But American Anthropologist has only a limited amount of space for these new review articles, and as an Americanist archaeologist I feel cheated. This paper covers only a tiny portion of current publishing in this field, and much of the content has nothing at all to do with Americanist archaeology as normally construed. Yet the Editor of the journal opines that Eiselt and the other review article authors have “succeeded wonderfully” in chronicling “what happened in a particular subfield of anthropology” in 2008 (Editor’s introduction, page 132). I disagree quite strongly with this judgment, and most of my “Americanist” colleagues would probably concur. Eiselt’s article is NOT about Americanist archaeology.


References:


Comas, Juan

1974 Cien años de Congresos Internacionales de Americanistas: Ensayo histórico-crítico y bibliográfico. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City.

Dunnell, Robert C.

1979 Trends in Current Americanist Archaeology. American Journal of Archaeology 83:437-449.

1986 Methodological Issues in Americanist Artifact Classification. Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 9:149-207.

Eiselt, B. Sunday

2009 Americanist Archaeologies: 2008 in Review. American Anthropologist 111:137-145.

Lyman, R. Lee and Michael J. O'Brien

2001 The Direct Historical Approach, Analogical Reasoning, and Theory in Americanist Archaeology. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 8:303-342.

2004 A History of Normative Theory in Americanist Archaeology. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 11:369-396.