Interim head of MIT Anthropology explains the plan's vision and challenges, plus progress made at an historic MIT workshop.
"This historic gathering brought leaders and stakeholders in anthropological knowledge-sharing into the same room to compare notes," said Heather Paxson, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Anthropology, and interim head of Anthropology at MIT. "We emerged with the outline of a pilot project to move scholarly journals to Open Access publishing, at a disciplinary scale."
Photo: Allegra Boverman
Publishers, librarians, research funders, and leaders from across the field of anthropology - including journal editors and representatives of the major Anglophone anthropological societies of both Europe and North America - gathered at MIT on April 24 for an invitational workshop focused on a sea change for everyone who attended: moving the discipline's journals to an open-access (OA) model.
Currently, the expense of academic publishing creates significant barriers to the broad dissemination of scholarly findings. The goal of the workshop was to consider a new model for providing open access to journal publications in a way that could transform both anthropology and a full range of academic disciplines. Professor Heather Paxson, interim head of MIT Anthropology, and an event organizer, shared her thoughts on the workshop and new OA plans with SHASS Communications.
Q: Why is open access so important for academic publications, and why has it been so difficult to achieve up until this point?
