The AIA and Open Access: A response
It’s a cliché but this time both of us writing this post
were surprised and then dismayed to read in Archaeology
Magazine’s most recent “Letter from the President” that the AIA has “taken
a stand against open access.” While the Letter began with discussion of US
government efforts to enforce open access for research it has funded, the words
“a stand against” go well beyond any specific case to formulate a general – and
we think backward looking - position.
If that’s where we are, it seems unusual that news of such an important
decision appeared in the Institute’s magazine and seems to have done so with no
consultation of the membership. But we suspect that no new general policy
exists.
We could go on with more examples but our point is that the
AIA exists in, contributes to and benefits from a network of open access
resources. Faced with this reality and these actions, it seems, as we said
above, that the Archaeology Magazine statement
doesn’t reflect an official AIA policy. Clarity from the Institute’s leadership
on this point would be very welcome.
Even more welcome would be a dialog on the role of open
access content in the AIA’s mission going forward. To start that a definition
of the term is useful so here’s one: Open Access means that anyone, including
the general public without institutional affiliation, can read at no cost, and
preferably on a wide variety of devices whether connected to the Internet or
not, digital content available from the AIA or elsewhere. To paraphrase that
long sentence, “anybody” and at “no cost” are the key terms.
Those of us who practice “open access”, meaning we generate research
and analysis and then look to place it in venues that will allow free access,
strongly believe that both the professional discipline of archaeology and the
public are best served by free access to high-quality content. To cut to the
chase, the site OpenContext (http://opencontext.org) publishes many
thousands of excavation records that anyone can search and download. You can
already find the work of AIA members on the site; see in particular the
material from Petra in Jordan. The Carolina
Digital Archive hosts field notes and preliminary reports from the site of
Azoria in Crete (https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/record?id=uuid%3a1add9fbc-f5c4-49a8-848e-96a52e3ade9c),
and you can download both field notes the final published reports of the
excavations at Kommos, also on Crete, via the University of Toronto’s digital
repository (https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/3004).
Again, we could cite more examples to show that the full range of works that archaeologists
produce – including peer reviewed scholarship - is increasingly becoming
available at no cost and with no requirement of academic affiliation. This all
counts as progress.
But what of the AIA’s most carefully produced scholarly work,
articles in the AJA. JSTOR currently charges $12.00 to download most
AJA articles. That’s $12.00 too much.
And it is little help that many US colleges and universities subscribe to JSTOR
so that faculty, students and staff don’t pay that price. The general public
has to pay and that reduces the impact that archaeology has on public
discourse. Shouldn’t we be giving our best, most carefully produced work the
greatest chance to be widely read?
Doing so is fairly straightforward: let anybody download any
AJA article for free. In truth, we don’t
expect that the AIA will choose this path in the short term. But we offer it as
a goal and note that there are transitional steps that can allow the AIA’s and AJA’s leadership to test models that
will take us all toward this future.
Right now, there are articles in journals from Cambridge
University Press, Oxford University Press, SAGE, and Wiley-Blackwell available
for free download. This happens because the authors paid upfront to allow
subsequent no-cost distribution. The Public
Library of Science takes this model one step further and uses a Creative
Commons license to publish its articles. This means that readers and libraries
can not only download PLOS content but also archive and redistribute it
legally. The published fees for such programs range from $2,900 at PLOS – which is too much for humanities
scholars – to $195.00 to place an article in the Sage Open Access program. That
starts to be a manageable amount, one that can be written into grants or
solicited from administrations.
Regardless of the specific source of funds, the initiation
of such a program by the AJA would be
a sign that the AIA’s long-standing support of Open Access – as indicated by
ongoing action, if not by its latest words – will continue and even grow.
Sebastian Heath and Charles E. Jones.
The writers are respectively Research Assistant Professor and Head Librarian at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University. Both are AIA members and have served the Institute in various capacities at the local and national level.