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Editors’ Choice: Open Access, A View from Cultural Anthropology

Open access publishing has been the subject of a great deal of discussion, and more than its fair share of anxiety in the academy, and in the social sciences in particular. These discussions have raised questions about everything from maintaining the quality of scholarly publications, to recognizing the value of scholars’ labor, to inevitable concerns about how such projects can be funded. I am by no means an expert on any of these matters, but in my one-time role as the president of the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA), I did contribute to important conversations that eventually lead to our journal, Cultural Anthropology, being offered as an open access publication in February 2014. I can offer some insights from the process of bringing Cultural Anthropology to open access, and the ongoing issues this created, that may be of wider relevance to thinking about the future of open access, as well as of academic publishing more generally.

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