The Museum Anthropology Review Weblog

Editorial: Museum Anthropology Review Joins IUScholarWorks at the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries, Switches to Open Journal Systems

Jason Baird Jackson

Museum Anthropology Review has been quiet since the New Year and it is time now to explain why. First I want to thank everyone–authors, visitors, friends of the project–who helped make Museum Anthropology Review’s first year of publication a resounding success. Since last February, many talented colleagues published 64 valuable contributions under the journal’s banner. Over 20,000 visitors consulted the site, which in turn meant that many of the contributions published here became the most highly ranked sources on their topics. This high level of usage, combined with the remarkable quality of the works that we were able to publish, consolidated the support of other stakeholders, including the museums and book publishers whose works were reviewed during the journal’s inaugural year. Thanks again to everyone who lent a hand and proved that an open access journal centered on, but extending beyond the bounds of, museum anthropology was a viable, worthwhile undertaking.

Among the most engaged supporters of the project have been my colleagues in the library at Indiana University Bloomington, where I am a member of the faculty. Almost as soon as we began publishing last February, we started partnering with remarkable, visionary librarians and library staff who saw the value of Museum Anthropology Review both as a venue for scholarly work and as a worthwhile experiment in the changing nature of research communication in the emerging open access era. Our first step together was to establish a system by which contributions to Museum Anthropology Review could be archived, preserved and made available digitally via our campus digital repository. This allowed me to assure authors that, whatever else might happen to the this site or the journal generally, their hard work would remain available into the future. Many readers have already consulted Museum Anthropology Review contributions in the IUScholarWorks Repository, where they were made available in PDF format.

As a community, the IU librarians took a special interest in what we were learning about the (low) costs and (high) benefits of open access publishing. I presented two library seminars on the project and on the wider state of journal publishing in anthropology and folklore. These were among the most exciting discussions that I have experienced in a campus context. Ruth Lilly Dean of University Libraries Patricia Steele, Executive Associate Dean Carolyn Walters and Associate Dean for Collection Development and Digital Publishing Julie Bobay were wonderfully supportive of the journal and we together began planning for the shift that we are now announcing and implementing on this, the journal’s one year anniversary. (Appreciation is also extended to my faculty and graduate student colleagues for help of all kinds.)

IUScholarWorks began as our DSpace instance on the IU campus. The IUScholarWorks “brand” now refers to an expanded range of services that includes the repository, but that has now been enlarged to include library supported journals being published with Open Journal Systems (OJS), the leading open source software tool for the publication of open access journals. I am proud that Museum Anthropology Review is the first such journal to be published in partnership with the IUB libraries. A great team from the libraries and the IU Digital Library Program has worked with me over the last four months to get ready to launch the journal as part of IUScholarWorks Journals using OJS. Much work remains to be done fine tuning and improving the quality of the site, but I am pleased to invite readers to visit the journal in its new home and to try it out. While WordPress software has been an amazingly easy and cost effective way to publish the journal, the move to OJS will bring many, many benefits to the effort. I will talk about some of these improvements in future editorials.

The content that we published during 2007 has been repackaged and reissued as Volume 1, Number 1 and Volume 1, Number 2. The contributions are available in HTML and PDF format. One advantage of the PDF format is that we have paginated the volume continuously, allowing authors and others to cite contributions in traditional bibliographic formats (In PDF, the volume is 203 pages long!) A large amount of content is in the cue awaiting publication in 2008. We will see Volume 2, Number 1 published as quickly as possible. It will contain several peer-reviewed articles, more of which will follow with Volume 2, Number 2 later in the year.

There is much more to be said, but for now I will close this explanation with an invitation to visit the journal’s new home at http://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/mar/index. While there, I hope that you will register as a reader of the journal. Doing so is completely free and allows us to count you among our supporters as well as provides you with the ability to submit contributions for review and possible publication, as well as to request tables of contents forwarded via email.

For the foreseeable future, we will maintain this, the journal’s WordPress site, using it to direct readers to the IUScholarWorks Journals/OJS site and hopefully also using it as a means of extending the work of the journal in new directions. What follows is the official Indiana University press release announcing the publishing partnership with the libraries and the expansion of the IUScholarWorks effort to include IUScholarWorks Journals.

Thanks again for your support and encouragement.

IUB Libraries Publish First Electronic Journal
Showcases faculty partnership

Through a partnership that marks a turning point in scholarly publishing at Indiana University, Ruth Lilly Dean of University Libraries Patricia Steele announces today the publication of Museum Anthropology Review, the first faculty-generated electronic journal supported by the IU Bloomington Libraries.

Edited by Jason Baird Jackson, associate professor in IU’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Museum Anthropology Review showcases a new model for Bloomington faculty to disseminate their scholarly work.

With this pilot test, the IUB Libraries are poised to support the electronic publication of journals, offering faculty editors a low-cost solution to the administrative and publishing functions of managing them. This expands the scope of IUScholarWorks, a set of services to make the work of IU scholars freely available, maximizing exposure and visibility of publications by making articles accessible to search services such as Google Scholar.

“Libraries nationwide are interested in supporting faculty who can realize the benefits of publishing open-access journals,” Steele says. “At IU, we’re especially pleased to help advance one of the university’s top disciplines. By partnering locally, we are truly helping to disseminate scholarship that will help researchers worldwide.”

Steele says that universities, and particularly libraries, have been squeezed in recent years by a system in which the cost of acquiring journals from commercial publishers has grown increasingly more expensive. Double-digit price increases forced upon library subscribers over the past decade have allowed commercial publishers to steadily grow their profits at the expense of university budgets. The library community contends that one approach to control runaway costs is to minimize the dependence on subscription-based models by publishing and promoting the use of freely available, or open access, journals.

Jackson founded Museum Anthropology Review on the basis of his experiences as editor of an established closed-access journal in his field—the similarly titled and focused Museum Anthropology. Unlike Museum Anthropology Review, this more established journal is published by the American Anthropological Association in a partnership with the for-profit publisher Wiley-Blackwell.

“The costs associated with publishing in the traditional mode are astronomical,” Jackson says. “Publication of a single research article in Museum Anthropology can cost thousands of dollars and, when published, the results will then be available to a small proportion of people worldwide.”

Jackson says 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 artists’ grandchildren—to gain access to her writing. Open access repositories and journals, in their varied forms, help make this possible.”

Begun in February 2007 as a pilot project using weblog software, Museum Anthropology Review published 64 contributions from scholars worldwide. The works were consulted more than 20,000 times, Jackson says, and for many of the books that were reviewed in the journal, the assessments published in Museum Anthropology Review are the most highly ranked pages in standard Web searches.

“Everyone involved with the effort has been thrilled with the results, Jackson says, “and I am happy to be continuing the project in a more durable and robust way through our partnership with the IUB Libraries.”

IUScholarWorks is a set of services supported by the IU Libraries and the Digital Library Program, a collaborative effort of the IU Libraries and University Information Technology Services.

For more information, go to scholarworks.iu.edu

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The IU Press Release can be found online, with images and contact information, here.

Updates

Find a news story on the launch in Library Journal Academic Newswire here.
Find a comment by MAR Associate Editor Kimberly Christen on her weblog Long Road here.
Find a mention of the launch on the English edition of Antropologi.info here.
Find coverage in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s The Wired Campus here.
The MAR and IUSW Journals launch is mentioned in an interview with Harvard University Librarian Robert Darnton appearing in Library Journal Academic Newswire here.
The big story on all of this appeared in Inside Higher Education on 2/28/2008 under the title “Abandoning Print, Not Peer Review.” Find it here, followed by day’s worth of vigorous discussion.
Relevant items in Open Access News can be found here and here.

Jason Baird Jackson is an Associate Professor of Folklore at Indiana University. He is the editor of Museum Anthropology Review and (through summer 2009) of Museum Anthropology.