Comments on: Community-Based Open Access, Fast and Slow

By: Martin Fotta

Martin Fotta — Fri, 22 Jun 2018 07:04:20 +0000

Here is the thing to follow: are all these anthropologists who withdrew (and announced that they withdrew) their books and articles from HAU going to send them straight to Chicago, or UC etc presses in the first case and top (pay-walled) anthropology journals in the second case (and have them accepted for the same reasons that made them HAUable — one’s name, topic, jargon etc… and push out more precarious scholars who would profit from publishing in such venues)?

By: Tim Elfenbein

Tim Elfenbein — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 21:39:38 +0000

In reply to Alexander King. Alexander, I don't think you've understood what Jason was getting at. He did not comment on the speed articles or books get published, but on the speed at which HAU scaled up. Speed to publication is a quite different, if equally intractable, issue.

By: Jason Baird Jackson

Jason Baird Jackson — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 19:44:47 +0000

Dear Alex, I wrote a more detailed reply and then lost it. You have a lot of editorial (Sibirica) and authorial experience and have understandings of where many of the bottlenecks in journal and book publishing are found. If you flag some of them here, your comment is likely to be better than the one that I wrote and lost. It is probably enough for me, in this second try, to note that slow time-to-review and slow time-to-publication is not the kind of slow that I am advocating for. Those kinds of slowness are a direct result of the kind of more and more, bigger, and faster, practices that characterize many parts of (neoliberal) academia. #hautalk discussions have flagged many of these unhealthy scholarly practices and values. There are many emerging and experimental practices in scholarly communication aimed at helping us all share scholarship more rapidly. I endorse many of them and have begun adopting some of them. A happy example is the work of my friends and colleagues at the IU Press, co-publisher of the Material Vernaculars book series with the Mathers Museum of World Cultures. In a number of cases, we have reduced the time to publication for MV books to one year. Innovations within the press operations are key to this. I hope to return to your engaging comment when I can. For now, everyone should know that I am eager to undue some of the factors that lead to publication delay not to promote delay itself. Appreciatively, Jason

By: Alexander King

Alexander King — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 17:36:38 +0000

Anthropology publishing is usually much too slow. Two years to get a book out, that’s crazy. 1-2 years to publish an article? WTF? Just because Hau was Da Col’s ponzi scheme doesn’t mean that we can’t speed up anthropology publishing.

By: Jason Baird Jackson

Jason Baird Jackson — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 17:18:49 +0000

With appreciation, I urge anyone who has wound their way to the conclusion of my Allegra Lab piece to now reward themselves for putting up with me by reading my colleague Elizabeth Cullen Dunn's tour de force essay "The Problem with Assholes." It was published concurrently with my essay and I 100% would have cited it had I read it in time. It speaks powerfully to another aspect of disciplinary ethos worthy of reflection and action-for-change. It is the big deal essay of the day, so do not miss out. Find it here at Public Anthropologist.