17 Dec 2021

Global Trajectories of Open Access

Webinar

EASA webinar series

In this third EASA Autumn webinar, we explore the contested meanings and forms of value associated with Open Access publishing, as well as its implications for the discipline of anthropology. Tracing its roots back to scholar-led online initiatives in the 1990s, Open Access has since become both a political movement to democratise scholarly knowledge and a highly profitable business model. Read more

This webinar will explore how Open Access debates have changed over twenty years and the key questions that remain: open for whom, by whom, at what cost, and with what infrastructural support (Meagher et al 2021)?

At a time when EASA’s journal Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale is about to be published by Berghahn under a ‘subscribe-to-open’ model, we will explore different approaches to, and financial models for, Open Access publishing initiatives across the disciplines and around the world. We ask why sustainability and community control are important principles for Open Access, and explore how they are being implemented in low resource settings. We also look beyond journals to think about the future and alternative forms of digital scholarship.

Speakers

Marcel LaFlamme

Public Library of Science (PLOS)

Marcel is Open Research Manager at the Public Library of Science (PLOS). Trained as a librarian and an anthropologist, he served from 2015 to 2019 as the managing editor of Cultural Anthropology. He sits on the executive committee of Libraria, a collective of researchers in the social sciences who seek to bring about a more open, diverse, and community-controlled scholarly communication system.

Vivian Berghahn

Berghahn Books

Vivian Berghahn is Managing Director and Journals Editorial Director at Berghahn Books. She has over 20 years of experience in academic publishing, and previously worked for Blackwell Publishing and Northeastern University Press. She serves on the AAP-PSP Committee and was co-opted member of the ALPSP Council (2015-2020), and is currently completing her PhD in Anthropology from the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Angela Okune

Engaging Science, Technology, and Society

Angela is an Associate Editor for the Open Access journal, Engaging Science, Technology, and Society where she supports contributors to experiment with new genres and mindful sharing of ethnographic data objects towards scholarly community building. Further, building on ten years of work in Nairobi’s tech research sector, Angela co-founded and maintains an experimental, open ethnographic data portal called Research Data Share (www.researchdatashare.org) that leverages the open-source “Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography” (PECE) to hold space for thinking about what postcolonial objectivity in Kenya is and could be. Angela will receive her doctorate in Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine in December 2021.

Chair

David Mills

University of Oxford and EASA exec member