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This morning, the journal Museum Anthropology Review was launched as an open access journal. The content that was published during 2007 (the journal’s first year) is now available in both HTML and PDF format – free for all readers all over the world.

Editor Jason Baird Jackson said that making scholarly work more easily and affordably accessible is especially important in fields like folklore and anthropology that are rooted in the study of local cultures worldwide:

“If, for instance, a scholar spends months documenting the work of an elderly woodcarver living in a small American town and then writes about what she learned in a peer-reviewed research article, I have an obligation as her editor to make it as easy as possible for the schoolchildren of that town — or the artist’s grandchildren — to gain access to her writing. Open access repositories and journals, in their varied forms, help make this possible.”

>> read the press release

>> more information on the Museum Anthropology Blog

>> website of the Museum Anthropology Review

UPDATE: Inside Higher Ed reports:

There are hundreds of scholarly journals published online, plenty of them free. But what makes Museum Anthropology Review’s launch notable is that it is being led by the same editor as the traditional journal, Museum Anthropology, using the exact same peer review system.

For years, the criticism of the free, online model has been that it would be impossible for it to replicate the quality control offered by traditional publishing. When online journal publishers have boasted of their quality control, print loyalists have said, in effect, “well maybe it’s good, but it can’t be as good as what we’re doing.”

To this subjective criticism, open access advocates can now point to someone who knows exactly what the standards are at both journals, as he’s leading them both.

>> read the whole article in Inside Higher Education

SEE ALSO:

Danah Boyd on Open Access: “Boycott locked-down journals”

Anthropology News February about Open Access Anthropology

2006 – The Year of Open Access Anthropology?

Why should anthropologists care about open access?

Open Access News

UPDATE: ScientificCommons was closed down in 2014

How can I find research papers and theses that are freely available? ScienceCommons is a search engine and portal that is still in beta but now lists 893 repositories (according to Peter Suber at Open Access News). A search for anthropology gives more that 44 000 hits but a quick check reveals that not all papers or theses are open access.

ScientificCommons.org is a project of the University of St.Gallen (Switzerland) and hosted and developed at the Institute for Media and Communications Management:

The major aim of the project is to develop the world’s largest communication medium for scientific knowledge products which is freely accessible to the public. A key challenge of the project is to support the rapidly growing number of movements and archives who admit the free distribution and access to scientific knowledge

>> visit ScientificCommons

There is another search engine as well: OAIster. There a search for anthropology gives 54679 records – but also included some papers with restricted access (f.ex. from journals like Current Anthropology)

See also 2007 Highlights over at Savage Minds: “2007 was a great year for the open access movement”.

SEE ALSO:

Already lots of publications in the open access anthropology repository Mana’o

2006 – The Year of Open Access Anthropology?

For Open Access: “The pay-for-content model has never been successful”