The Museum Anthropology Review Weblog

As part of the larger reworking of Museum Anthropology Review‘s technical infrastructure, especially the move to publishing with the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries using Open Journal Systems, MAR has a new email address separate from that which has been used by Museum Anthropology. In future correspondence related to MAR, please use museumanthropologyreview (at) gmail (dot) com. We will be updating the basic information found on this site to bring it into alignment with the journal’s new home in IUScholarWorks Journals. Please visit the journal in its new home here.

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. Continue reading ‘Editorial: Museum Anthropology Review Joins IUScholarWorks at the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries, Switches to Open Journal Systems’