"I sought to publish my book open access because I wrote it primarily for graduate students in my field of Byzantine studies. It's a complete revision of the way that chronicles (the standard form of history writing in the Byzantine period) are understood to have approached the past. Brill is one of the most important publishers for my field, but also one of the most expensive. I knew publishing with Brill would inhibit grad students' access to my work. Open Access was the way to get around this problem."
"I applied to my field’s leading grant provider, the Mary Jaharis Center, for one of their “Publication Grants” awards. The award had not previously gone to a digital book, but I was able to persuade the committee that this was a good trend to start. Their maximum award was only $3,000, however, and the cost to make my book open access was $10,700. After working with the grants office at Wesleyan we were unable to find anywhere else suitable to apply, and so I approached Academic Affairs at Wesleyan for a publication subvention. They agreed to cover the remaining expense."
The Chronographia of George the Synkellos and Theophanes by "I have always sought to make my scholarship freely available and accessible, so it matters that work published in Cultural Anthropology can circulate to multiple audiences beyond those attached to research libraries with subscriptions. It also matters that Cultural Anthropology is a prestigious peer-reviewed journal with a large readership. It was an ideal place for my article.
Cultural Anthropology is a flagship journal, widely recognized in the discipline for its forward-looking and innovative approaches to ethnography and contemporary theory. It went Open Access (OA) in 2014, and is the only OA American Anthropological Association (AAA) journal. Cultural Anthropology is funded by grants, institutional sponsorships, and SCA membership — there is no possibility of authors’ fees in anthropology (very few anthropologists have access to the kind of research funding in the lab sciences). The main impetus for OA then as now is to make our work accessible to global and diverse publics, especially the communities within which we work. This is a central ethical demand in cultural anthropology. The AAA is now discussing pathways to Open Access for more of its journals, in part due to the success of Cultural Anthropology."
"Cultural Anthropology is the peer-reviewed journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA), a section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Cultural Anthropology is a flagship journal, widely recognized in the discipline for its forward-looking and innovative approaches to ethnography and contemporary theory. It went Open Access (OA) in 2014, and is the only OA AAA journal.
The transition to OA was complicated. SCA members, its executive board, and the journal editors had been interested in OA for a long time, but SCA is a section of the AAA, and the AAA contracts with Wiley-Blackwell to publish the journals of more than twenty of its sections. So, Cultural Anthropology needed an exception (granted in 2012) and SCA had to build out publishing and production systems. The first open access issue came out in February 2014. Cultural Anthropology is funded by grants, institutional sponsorships, and SCA membership — there is no possibility of authors’ fees in anthropology (very few anthropologists have access to the kind of research funding in the lab sciences). As SCA Treasurer, I can attest to the complexities of this system!
The main impetus for OA then as now is to make our work accessible to global and diverse publics, especially the communities within which we work. This is a central ethical demand in for cultural anthropology. It is also crucial for anthropology’s critical, global analyses of power to reach a broader public audience — connecting with new readers beyond institutional libraries.
I’ve published several pieces in Cultural Anthropology and also on the website. Beyond Cultural Anthropology, the SCA also curates digital content: short-form essays, a podcast, teaching tools, media reviews, etc. This curated digital content is also part of the OA mission of SCA as it is free and accessible online. It brings anthropology to a broader public audience and moves faster than journal publishing. My work includes a forum on the problematics of collaborative research methods. I was interviewed for the SCA Podcast “AnthroBites” on queer anthropology. And I published an article “Always After: Desiring Queerness, Desiring Anthropology” in the journal, Cultural Anthropology. Only the journal is peer-reviewed, but the other aspects of SCA/Cultural Anthropology publishing enrich the ecosystem and contribute to its reputation and reach. My podcast, for instance, has been listened to 16,980 times — a good bit more engagement than most articles!
I have always sought to make my scholarship freely available and accessible, so it matters that work published in Cultural Anthropology can circulate to multiple audiences beyond those attached to research libraries with subscriptions. It also matters that Cultural Anthropology is a prestigious peer-reviewed journal with a large readership. It was an ideal place for my article (which was part of a cluster of four pieces on contemporary queer anthropology, based on a symposium on queer anthropology held at Yale). Cultural Anthropology’s OA model is part of that innovation: both a commitment to moving cultural anthropology forward and to engaging audiences beyond cultural anthropology.
There is more we can do to make anthropology more accessible beyond OA – for instance, while I was on the editorial board of Cultural Anthropology, from 2018-2022, we began including article abstracts in both English and in the language of the research location. The new journal editors have begun accepting articles in Spanish (as well as English). But OA is a crucial part of accessibility.
The AAA is now discussing pathways to Open Access for more of its journals, in part due to the success of Cultural Anthropology (and also the downsides of working with WB). So, the experiment has paid off — Cultural Anthropology has been a leader in OA in anthropology, and hopefully we will see other journals moving in this direction."
