Ryan Anderson: Thanks
for doing this interview, Jason. My first question is really basic:
What IS open access all about, and how is it any different from standard
academic publishing?
Jason Baird Jackson:
Its a pleasure to have this chance to talk about open access (hereafter,
OA). When I am asked to recommend an explanation of what OA is about, I
usually point colleagues to the basic introductory documents assembled
by philosopher and OA strategist
Peter Suber. His one page "
Very Brief Introduction to Open Access"
is a great place to start. It begins noting: "Open-access (OA)
literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most
copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the
internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder." There is
much more that scholarly authors, societies, publishers, and libraries
need to know about OA, but this is a good start. The features that Suber
notes in this sentence comprise the basic differences that you are
searching for.
OA evokes different things for different people and
interest groups. I suspect that we will touch on some of the range of
concerns that these actors bring to the topic. For a time, it made sense
to speak of OA as an alternative to standard academic publishing but I
do not think that this framing works any longer. While OA represents a
significant set of transformations in what we might think of as the
inherited scholarly publishing domain, OA is now at the heart of
standard academic publishing. That does not mean that there is agreement
about the issues or about emergent practices or even about the
definition of basic terms. My "its all one system now" view just
acknowledges such facts on the ground as the reality that we now have
academic authors publishing in "gold OA" journals without even realizing
that such a nameable kind of publication exists as such. On the other
side of the ledger, the largest commercial publishers are fully, if
sometimes begrudgingly, involved in open access through their having
acceded to public, university, and funder demands for what is called
"green OA" and via their author-pays approaches to gold and "hybrid”
OA". (We'll touch on these modes, perhaps.) While people like me tend to
talk about OA as a means towards a dramatic transformation of scholarly
communication, one aimed at making it more sustainable, accountable,
ethical, public, etc., commercial publishers increasingly describe OA as
just another business model. We are debating and rebuilding the same
publishing system even if, at times, and in some senses, it seems like
OA advocates are creating an alternative infrastructure for the
discovery, circulation, evaluation, and reuse of scholarly research
outputs.
It can be treated as a different topic, one that we need
only acknowledge and not discuss, but I just used the terribly clumsy
phrase "research outputs" as a way of highlighting the parallel
transformations that we are experiencing in the system of scholarly
genres. Running alongside the OA transformation, the canonical
genres—journal article and scholarly book—are being remixed and
destabilized in countless ways. For anthropology, these generic changes
are different from those that followed the field's "writing culture"
debates. Earlier, we wondered what we could say in a book. Now we wonder
what a book is. In your own corner of the new territory, I could ask:
Is your
anthropologies project
a journal, a scholarly website, a weblog? Do your authors know? Such
questions are increasingly present and point to what a time of
experimentation we are in. OA advocates in anthropology have been
particularly attentive to this related-but-not-the-same issue of genre.
That said, the core of the OA discussion has been the journal article as
we've known it and few would deny its continued centrality as the
currency of the academic realm.
