Worth a Read: Open Access and the transformation of academic publishing

This short piece by Brad Weiss provides a reflection on Cultural Anthropology’s transition to open access publishing and a thoughtful discussion of the questions which drove this decision and the subsequent questions which exiting from Wiley-Blackwell has raised.

After the American Anthropological Association began publishing its journals through Wiley-Blackwell in 2004, critics from the Society for Cultural Anthropology wondered:

why should academics give the products of their scholarly labor—in the form of both their articles and their work as reviewers—to a for-profit press that generates its revenue by selling those products back to our home institutions in the form of (rather expensive) library subscriptions?

This question sparked the beginning of a journey towards open access. Read the rest of the story here: