Throwing away my old reprints

This summer I am moving my office and lab to another building. As I pack up, I am tossing lots of old paperwork and junk. So what do I do with the two file drawers full of my old reprints? Most of these papers are posted on my website, so I really don't need to keep reprints. Apart from one or two that are very nice aesthetically (e.g., my reprint from Hansen's city-states book has a beautiful color image of an painting of  "good government" on the cover), I should just toss them all. But I am a pack-rat by nature; maybe I will want these someday (yeah, right). More importantly, these reprints are my career! This is what I have accomplished as a scholar. How can I just toss these things into the recycle bin?

I spent a few weeks going back and forth (Toss them all! Save them all!), and then my wife suggested I keep a few complete sets and toss the rest. Maybe our kids will want these someday. Maybe we'll need something to light fires with in post-carbon times.

One useful thing has come out of this. The student who is helping me organize things prior to moving (Theresa Araque) checked to see which reprints are not yet scanned and on my website. So I will now try to get more of my old articles scanned or downloaded and posted. I'm sure thousands of people are waiting with bated breath to read such gems as "The Aztec silent majority: William T. Sanders and the study of the Aztec peasantry" (edited book, 1996).

"ranking web of world universities"

A research group in Spain has produced a ranking of world universities in terms of the scholarly value of their websites. This is a massive complication of objective data on 20,000 universities by the Cybermetrics Lab of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Spain. Thiey describe their objectives as follows:

"The original aim of the Ranking was to promote Web publication. Supporting Open Access initiatives, electronic access to scientific publications and to other academic material are our primary targets. However web indicators are very useful for ranking purposes too as they are not based on number of visits or page design but on the global performance and visibility of the universities."

What I like about this ranking is that it is based on scholarly value: numbers of pages, numbers of papers and reports posted, and the external links to such. Features such as institutional repositories, online journals, web databases, etc. contribute heavily to the rankings. Here is an outline of their measures:
_______________________________________________________________
Four indicators were obtained from the quantitative results provided by the main search engines as follows:

Size (S). Number of pages recovered from four engines: Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Exalead.
Visibility (V). The total number of unique external links received (inlinks) by a site can be only confidently obtained from Yahoo Search.
Rich Files (R). After evaluation of their relevance to academic and publication activities and considering the volume of the different file formats, the following were selected: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf), Adobe PostScript (.ps), Microsoft Word (.doc) and Microsoft Powerpoint (.ppt). These data were extracted using Google, Yahoo Search, Live Search and Exalead.
Scholar (Sc). Google Scholar provides the number of papers and citations for each academic domain. These results from the Scholar database represent papers, reports and other academic items.

The four ranks were combined according to a formula where each one has a different weight but maintaining the ratio 1:1:

 ____________________________________________________________________


My university, ASU, has a lower ranking than I'd like (#56 worldwide). It is held down, for one thing, by a very poor score on the Google Scholar index, which looks like a good measure of academic papers posted online. If we had an institutional repository, even one below the university level (such as at the level of my school......), this would help. It would raise the university's score, but more importantly it would contribute to the broader missions of scholarship and access to scholarship. These are missions that transcend the university and quantitative rankings, and they are among the missions that motivate this blog.

Post your peer-reviewed papers (see my past entires listed under "self-archiving"), urge your colleagues and students to do this, and urge your institutions to adopt enlightened policies of self-archiving and open access.

The Open Access Citation Advantage

I just read an especially clear and concise discussion of the Open Access citation advantage. This is from Colin Smith's blog, Open Research Online:

"For those unfamiliar with this, based on the (quite reasonable) assumptions that:

1) a proportion of researchers do not have access to all published research that is relevant to them;
2) the problem would be otherwise addressed by unavailable research being freely available online; and
3) some of these articles would be relevant, and thus citable…

the expectation is that published research made openly accessible online will carry a “citation advantage”. In other words, by publishing or archiving research in an open access manner, the chances of one’s work being cited improves."

If you want to look at this in more detail, Alma Swan reviews the published research on the OA citation advantage here (and the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the existence of the citation advantage, contra some skeptics) :

Swan, Alma
2010 The Open Access Citation Advantage: Studies and Results to Date (draft version). Technical Report. School of Electronics & Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton.

A very important point to bring away from this is that the citation advantage does not require waiting until all journals are published as open access ("gold OA"). Rather, it happens when authors self-archive their peer-reviewed publications, either in an institutional repository or in another fashion ("green OA").

If you do not already self-archive your publications, you should do one of these (and if you don't publish your work, I'm not sure why you are reading this blog):

• If your university or institution has an institutional repository, sign up and start using it. I can't do this, since ASU does not have such a repository.
  
• Sign up with Academia.edu and post your papers there. Yes, I know, the interface for posting paper is clunky and inefficient, but it works. And Academia.edu has EXCELLENT coverage in Google searches. I do this, but with only a few papers.
  
• Sign up with Selected Works by Berkeley Electronic Press and post your papers there. I do this too, partly as an experiment; but the interface and download statistics are great.
  
• Get space on your institution's server, make your own webpage, and post your papers. This is where I post everything (well, almost everything).
  
• Get space on a commercial server (even Facebook will work, I think) and post your papers.
  

It does not take much time, and it will improve your citation levels and make colleagues (like me) happy.

Benefits of Open Access for Research Dissemination

The following text is taken from the website of OASIS (Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook). It is specifically from the page, "Benefits of Open Access for research dissemination for Researchers." Check out the entire site.

Open Access benefits researchers, institutions, nations and society as a whole. For researchers, it brings increased visibility, usage and impact for their work. Institutions enjoy the same benefits in aggregated form. There is growing evidence to show that countries also benefit because Open Access increases the impact of the research in which they invest public money (see Houghton and Sheehan's study on the economic impact of enhanced access to research findings) and therefore there is a better return on investment. Society as a whole benefits because research is more efficient and more effective, delivering better and faster outcomes for us all.

Open Access is the alternative to Closed Access (or Subscription Access or Toll Access). Traditionally, journals have been sold on subscription to libraries. In the age of print-on-paper this was the only model available that enabled publishers to disseminate journals and recoup the cost. Unfortunately, this meant that only researchers in institutions that could afford to pay the subscription charges were able to read journal articles. Even wealthy universities could only afford a proportion of the world's research literature. For institutions in poorer countries this proportion is tiny or even non-existent. At the beginning of this millennium, more than half the research-based institutions in the poorest countries had no current journal subscriptions and over 20% had an average of two subscriptions.

Now, in the age of the World Wide Web, it is possible for research findings to be disseminated free of charge to anyone who wishes to read them. Those with access to the journals in their libraries will access the articles as before - though some people say that it is actually quicker and easier to access Open Access copies through a search engine (one or two clicks) than to access the published article in a journal through their library website (which normally takes several steps). Those who do not have the journals they want in their library can use Google or other Web search engines to track down the Open Access literature in institutional and subject repositories.

Repositories can provide usage data to show the number of times articles have been downloaded. The levels of this type of usage can be surprising. For example, in New Zealand, the University of Otago’s Business School set up an Open Access repository in November 2005: by February 2006, with just 220 articles in it at the time, it had received almost 20,000 ‘hits’ (downloads) (Stanger and McGregor, 2006). No doubt many of these are translating into citations over time.

Developing country repositories also enjoy a high level of usage of repositories, which are at last providing to the rest of the world the outputs from scholars in those countries who previously had difficulty publishing in 'western' journals. For example, the Institutional Repository of the Universidad de Los Andes in Venezuela, with ~14,000 records, registered 502,000 full text downloads in 2008 from both regional and international users.

Journal authors may not get pdfs of their articles

I just saw a post from 2008 in which Lisa Wynn, author of a paper in the Journal of Social Archaeology, complains that she was not provided with a pdf of her article by the publisher (Sage). This was posted on Culture Matters, and also on anthropologi.info. It seems that Sage provides authors with a proprietory application that allows one to print one's article on a single computer, but not save it or send it to colleagues. I guess it is just one more example of how commercial journal publishers rip off academic authors. First, they make money off of our unpaid research efforts, and second, they try to limit our own use of our intellectual products.

Several solutions come to mind. Lisa Wynn, the author in question, suggests boycotting Sage journals. I use the SPARC authors addendum, an attachment to copyright agreement with publishers. This give the author more rights than is typical with commercial publishers. Most journal publishers have gone along, but when a publisher refuses to honor the addendum, I will let you guess what I do about it.

But on a fundamental level I think authors should take their professional work into their own hands. Scan your Sage (or other) paper to create your own pdf reprint, and then post it on your website (or on Academia, edu, or on Selected Works, or anywhere you can). I notice that Lisa Wynn does not make her papers available to download on her website.

Make your work available as widely as possible, regardless of whether commercial publishers may want to limit the visibility of research they publish. Whose research is it anyway?

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).
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Open Access yields five-fold citation advantage

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:

Gentil-Beccot, Anne, Salvatore Mele, and Travis C. brooks
2009 Citing and Reading Behaviours in High-Energy Physics: How a Community Stopped Worrying about Journals and Learned to Love Repositories. Paper posted online.

As summarized and discussed by Seven Harnad:

"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.

Please post your papers on the internet

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.

Financial viability of open access

I am responding here to a comment just posted on an old post of mine ("You should self-archive your publications, July, 2008). The author of the comment asks about the financial viability of open access journal publishing if the costs are transferred from authors to subscribers. This is a complex issue that is much discussed in the Open Access literature; see Peter Suber's blog and publications or Stevan Harnad's listserv and publications. For now, all I will venture is to say that it would be very difficult to switch from the reader-pay model to the author-pay model in archaeology without a lot of other activities. For example, if university libraries stopped paying journal subscriptions and instead paid authors fees, this might work, but this will not happen soon or easily. Or if professional societies wanted to subsidize OA journals, they could move subscription revenues to publication costs. But the wholesale switch would be difficult and complex, and I don't pretent to understand the economics of journal publishing and its possible changes in the future.

BUT:

the above only talks about one kind of OA - "Gold OA" (open access journals). There is another route, "Greeen OA" (self-archiving). If authors would simply deposit their reprints (or pre-prints) into an institutional repository, we can achieve the goals of OA much more quickly. And this is something that AUTHORS and the institutions can do, it does not require large commercial enterprises to change what they are doing. WE can do it, and we can do it NOW.

Now it is currently difficult to find an institutional repository for archaeology. My university, Arizona STate University, does not have a repository (certainly not becuase of any silence on my part....). The Society for American Archaeology does not have a repository, and I have not heard any talk in the SAA about this (same for the AMerican Anthropological Association). So here are three possibilities; I am pursuing two of them:

(1) Make your own quick and dirty repository. Post your pdfs, include a page that lists the citations with links, and get that page indexed in Google etc. This is NOT HARD TO DO. Ask your institutional IT people how to make a quick web page. It is not difficult. Here is my example.

(2) Try Selected Works, at the Berkeley Electronic Press. Their main model is to sell subscriptions to institutions and then host all of their publicaitons, but they also host individuals gratis by application. I have no idea how restrictive they are; I applied and was accepted. Here is my Selected Works site.

(3) Try another genreal archive. The University of Hawai'i has started an experimental anthropology repository, the Mana'o Project. I am waiting to see where this goes before participating, partly because its hard to find time when I'm already posting things in 2 other places, and partly because of my uneasiness right now about how my own research relates (or does not relate) to the discpline of anthropology.

In sum, the question of author-pay vs. reader-pay is difficult and complex. But the question of self-archiving is about as simple as you can get. Build it (your own repository) and they will come. And in the process, the flow of information within archaeology will be greatly enhanced and the discipline improved tremendously.

Article downloads: English vs. Spanish

A few months ago I put a bunch of my papers on the Selected Works site as an experiment in open access. Although most of my papers are posted on my own web site, Selected Works has several advantages: it may be better indexed and more widely available than my own website; the interface is cleaner; the papers are easily arranged by topic; and they keep data on the number of downloads.

I just got a report on downloads from Selected Works for the month from Nov 4 through Dec 4. The most striking feature of these data is the much larger number of downloads of my papers that are published in Spanish. Here are the data:

	Language of paper:
measure	English	Spanish
# papers posted	21	7
mean # downloads	7.0	39.3
# downloads: distribution
1-3	5	1
4-8	10	1
9-12	6	2
>45	0	3

During the one-month period, my 21 English-language papers were downloaded at an average of 7 downloads per paper, whereas the average of the 7 Spanish-language papers was 39.3 downloads! I'm not sure exactly how to interpret this. I seriously doubt that my Spanish language papers are "more important" than my English language papers. More likely, I think, is the possibility is that my English language papers are more widely available to English-speaking readers through JSTOR and journal websites, so people can get them in other ways. Readers in Mexico, Spain, and other Spanish-speaking countries, on the other hand, probably ave less access to existing journal websites, and/or the journals in question do not have their content as consistently posted online as the English language journals.

These 28 papers include a combination of journal articles and book chapters; the most popular (with 113 hits!!!) is a joint-authored paper:

Rojas, José Luis de and Michael E. Smith
2007 El imperio de la triple alianza (Tenochtitlan, Texcoco y Tlacopan) en el siglo XXI. Revista Española de Antropología Americana 37:81-07.

Perhaps people are looking for José's papers, and I am riding his coat-tails here.

I find it a bit upsetting that the papers I consider my best and most important ("Form and Meaning in the Earliest Cities", or "The Archaeology of Ancient State Economies") were below average on the download scale (5 each).

It is not difficult to imagine various scenarios that could explain the dominance of Spanish over English downloads. Perhaps my English-speaking audience goes to my own website, whereas my Spanish-speaking audience prefers Selected Works. Or maybe some of my Spanish papers have been adopted as required readings in classes.

But regardless of the possible interpretations, I find these data striking. The central message, it seem to me, is that English language audiences are much better served by existing Open Access practices than are Spanish language audiences. Shouldn't more of my Latin Americanist colleagues in the U.S. be posting their papers online (wheverever they can)? Its not very hard; email me if you want some advice or suggestions.

Self-Archiving through SelectedWorks

When one is looking on the internet for information on the publications or activities of a scholar, there are few things lamer than an outdated (and poorly organized) departmental web site. When an article that was published in 2006 is listed as "in press," you know that the web site is almost worthless. Here is one solution that is being offered by Berkeley Electronic Press (a leader in Open Access journals):

"For years, I've heard colleagues complain that their school-run faculty publication pages are unattractive, out-of-date and difficult to maintain. Website change requests can take weeks or even months to implement because tech support teams are overloaded. At the same time, Deans complain of the money they pour into their IT groups. Too many school websites have failed at their mission: to showcase faculty research. For this reason, we have developed SelectedWorks. SelectedWorks offers the highest level of web-publishing technology at a price any school can afford. It is attractive, easy to use, and fully customizable."

--Aaron Edlin, co-founder, The Berkeley Electronic Press

Here is some prose from the SelectedWorks web page:

With SelectedWorks, Authors can

• Present research in an engaging manner
• Post and share articles, working papers, presentations and more
• Take control of ownership and dissemination
• Organize work according to personal criteria
• Preserve work in a viewable, usable manner

With SelectedWorks, Institutions get

• Increased visibility of institution's scholarly production
• A web-based solution that includes digital tools and web-hosting
• Orderly and consistent layout across faculty sites
• Simplified aggregation and archiving of digital content
• Full IT support and customer service

I have asked my institution about the possibilities of subscribing to this service (no reply). But SelectedWorks also allows individual free subscriptions, so I am trying it out:

Michael E. Smith SelectedWorks page.

Uploading pdfs (or other formats) is easy, and the page looks clean and well organized (according to whatever categories one defines). Entering the citation data is a pain in the neck, not because the page is poorly designed but just having to cut and paste the components of each citation. It would help greatly if they allowed data translation from Endnote files. I may or may not try too move all my articles from my personal web page to SelectedWorks, I'll see how this seems to work out. I present this post not as an endorsement of SelectedWorks or the Berkeley Electronic Press, but as an exploration of the publication and open access possibilities for archaeologists.

You should self-archive your publications

“Merely to do the research and then put your findings in a desk drawer is no better than not doing the research at all. Researchers must submit their research to peer review and then “publish or perish,” so others can use and apply their findings, But getting findings peer reviewed and published is not enough either: Other researchers must find the findings useful, as proved by their actually using and citing them. And to be able to use and cite them, they must first be able to access them.” (Harnad et al. 2008:37)

This statement provides one of the major reasons to embrace Open Access publishing. But as the authors make clear, many academics are confused about the nature of OA publishing. They tend to equate “open access” with so-called “Gold” OA: internet journals whose content is freely available without the costs of subscription. But in actuality, it is the other kind of OA, “Green” OA, that has the greatest potential to increase the availability and impact of published journal articles. As I have discussed in this blog previously, green OA involves self-archiving. Authors post their papers on the internet, in one of 3 ways: in an institutional repository, in a disciplinary repository, or on one’s own web page.

The accompanying graph, from Harnad et al. 2008:34, shows the increase in citations for journal articles whose authors made them OA by self-archiving. If you want others to read and cite your papers, you should self-archive them. Its a no-brainer. Now archaeology does not have a disciplinary repository (the chances of the AAA or SAA doing this are perhaps slightly above zero), and my institution does not have an institutional repository, so I just throw pdfs up on my web site. And you should do the same.

Harnad, Stevan, Tim Brody, François Vallières, Les Carr, Steve Hitchcock, Yves Gingras, Charles Oppenheim, Chawki Hajjem, and Eberhard R. Hilf
2008 The Access/Imipact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access: An Update. Serials Review 34(1):36-40.

Available online: published pdf

manuscript copy

Open Access Anthropology

The new journal, Open Access Anthropology, is now up and running. Out of 3 articles, there is one archaeology paper:

The Anatolian Clay Sealing: The First Quality Assurance System of Human History? Authors: Anna Maria Ravagnan, Enzo Grossi. Open Access Anthropology 1:11-13.

This commercial journal charges authors between $600 and $900 to publish articles, which are peer reviewed. The journal home page has a link for "endorsements," which consist of a bunch of quotes about how great Open Access journals are (in general).

Open Access is important, and I am definitely in favor of it. But I'm not anxious to start forking over hundreds of dollars to publish my papers in new, untried journals ("Gold OA"). The quicker and less expensive route is self-archiving, known as Green OA. I remain baffled why more archaeologists (and their home institutions) aren't moving toward institutional repositories and self-archiving.

If you are new to this, please check out some of Stevan Harnad's papers. Is there any reason at all not to do this ??????

ADDENDUM (Added July 15, 2008). "Open Anthropology" is published by Bentham Science Publishers. For some context on their for-profit OA journals, see Richard Poynder's interview with one of their executives.

Self-Archiving

The goal of the Open Access (OA) movement is to “free the refereed literature online” (Harnad 2001b). That is, published, peer-reviewed research, which scholars have produced and published on their own time at their own expense, should be free of restrictions imposed by journals acting in their own monetary interests. Many of the proposed solutions—e.g., to found and promote more online OA journals, to have authors pay for publishing articles (to replace lost subscription income)—are difficult or unworkable in the short term. Journals will not start giving away their content for free, authors will not stop publishing in the top journals to send their paper to new OA journals.

Stevan Harnad has argued consistently and strongly that the most workable and immediate way to free the published scholarly literature is for authors to self-archive their publications online (Harnad 2001a, b, 2003a, b). The best way to do this is to post publications in public online archives hosted by universities or professional organizations. Papers will be available for the long term and they will be searchable. Authors need to revise the publisher’s contracts (“authors agreements”) that cover published journal articles, and they need to spend the time and effort to participate in archiving projects. The impact of a published paper (as measured by the number of citations) increases significantly if it is posted online and available for free.

I have been self-archiving my own papers for years, before I knew what “open access” or “self-archiving” meant. I just scan or obtain pdfs of my papers and post them on my web site :

http://www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9/Publications.html.

When I started doing this, a former colleague accused me of shameless self-promotion. This person evidently thought it unseemly to promote one’s own published work like this. But why do we carry out research and publish it? For our personal amuseument? Certainly not to make money. We do research in order to advance knowledge and contribute to a larger body of research findings (well, in my case, it’s also nice to live in Mexico periodically, to have to eat Mexican food and listen to Mexican music, to be working outdoors…..). The more easily that other scholars can find and read and cite our work, the greater our research impact and the more successful our scholarship.

I’ve written some review articles that required getting into unfamiliar literature. I found it easy to get up to speed quickly in a new field when the leading scholars have online archives of their publications and papers (two are my favorite such sites are those of Samuel Bowles http://www.santafe.edu/~bowles/ and Herbert Gintis http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~gintis/; if you are not familiar with their work, you probably should be, and it is easy to accomplish from their web sites).

There are a couple of problems with my kind of “guerrilla” self-archive. First, it is not permanent. If I leave ASU, the URL will most likely disappear pretty quickly. It was really pulling teeth to get my former university to keep my web site going for a few months after I moved to ASU. Such decisions at most universities are made by technical bureaucrats, not scholars (“if you are no longer an employee, why should we give you web space?”). The second problem is that my papers are not as fully indexed and searchable as one would like. Yes, many can be found through Google, but a fully indexed and searchable institutional archive would vastly improve their availability. There is now work in progress to allow searching across online archives.

Research has shown that many faculty do not self-archive because they think it is difficult, or that they don’t have time (see work by Alma Swan, e.g., http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12428/). It takes me all of 5 minutes to post an article on my web site, and with automated institutional archives it can be even quicker (so they say, although I haven’t been able to participate in any such program yet). One advantage is that by posting my papers online I don’t have to bother colleagues with electronic reprints emailed to a bunch of people who may or may not be interested in a particular paper; they can get things from my web site if and when they are interested.

I am surprised at the low level of self-archiving in archaeology. Sometimes it seems as if our scientific focus on the ancient past carried over into a reluctance to use modern practices and opportunities.

In addition to Harnad’s papers, listed below, check out these sites for more information on self-archiving:

E-Prints self-archiving FAQ:
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/

Wikipedia has a short entry with a nice bibliography (including many Harnad papers), current through 2006:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-archiving
(But please don’t tell my undergraduate students that I advocate Wikipedia as a reference source!)

Peter Suber’s Open Access News blog has lots of information:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

REFERENCES CITED:

Harnad, Stevan

2001a The Self-Archiving Initiative. Nature 410:1024-1025. http://cogprints.org/1642/.

2001b Six Proposals for Freeing the Refereed Literature Online: A Comparison. Ariadne 28. http://cogprints.org/1702/.

2003a Online Archives for Peer-Reviewed Journal Publications. In International Encyclcopedia of Library and Information Science, edited by John Feather, and Paul Sturges. Routledge, London. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/%7Eharnad/intpub.html.

2003b Self-Archive Unto Others as Ye Would Have Them Self-Archive Unto You. Australian Higher Education Supplement. http://cogprints.org/3022/.
(This paper is a particularly good introduction for those who know little of self-archiving)