sey075

Check out Daniel Lende's post on Neuroanthopology, "American Anthropological Association takes public stand against open access. " This concerns an open letter submitted by AAA Executive Director William Davis to the White House call for public comment on public access to scholarly publications. Wow, it looks like the AAA has lined up with the commercial publishers, not with scholars and researchers. Do you recall the c artoon I published on open access a few weeks ago? Well, the AAA has now joined with commercial publishers as the tail wagging the research dog. This development makes me glad that I resigned from the American Anthropological Association last year. It is one thing to complain about a professional association that is inefficient or clueless or off-base about some things. But the situation is really bad when the leadership goes over to the dark side of the force, making scholars ashamed of being anthropologists.

I just got a rejection for a manuscript sent to the journal Science. That's strike two for me with Science (I sent them my paper on agricultural terraces, back in the early 1990s; it ended up in JFA). I have something else up my sleeve for Science; maybe the third time will work. Because so many papers are submitted to Science , they have a bulk system for evaluating them. Each manuscript gets a quick once-over by one of a small number of editors, who say "no" to most papers. If they say "yes," then the paper gets sent out for peer review. This means that rejections come fast - it took them just a few days to reject my paper. I have to admire that efficiency. This experience got me thinking about how the Science review process affects the kinds of archaeology papers published in the journal. If you pay attention to the journal, you will know that they tend to favor high-tech methods, archaeometry, fancy quantitative methods, and reports about "the earlie...

Just got the Dec 2011 issue of Latin American Antiquity. This allowed me to complete the book review graph through 2011. This graph shows the number of book reviews published per year in the journal: This really steams me up, and I've complained about it before; see some of the posts listed under "book reviews" in the list of terms on the right side of the blog (scroll down). We can't trust publishers, even academic presses, to not publish bad books. Yes, most book manuscripts are reviewed by outside reviewers, but a good number of real stinkers (and lots of pedestrian yawners) get through that process and are published each year. So how does the discipline exercise quality control with respect to books? This is a prime role for book reviews in peer reviewed journals.  But if the major journals refuse to publish book reviews, the discipline suffers. My field, Mesoamerican archaeology, is particularly badly served by its major journals. Ancient Mesoamerica refuses to ...

Wednesday, Jan 18, much of the Internet will be on strike to protest the censorship legislation now before Congress. The bill, known as "Stop Online Piracy Act," will have a chilling effect on the use of the internet in the U.S. and around the world. Scholarship and free expression will be reduced, while large media corporations will increase their profits. Lots of basic scholarly practice will become criminalized. For information see the SOPA STRIKE site (including ways to write your congressman, code to temporarily black out your site for the day (as Wikipedia will do), and other materials. Wikipedia has a very nice article , with pro and con views, supporters and detractors, technical details, and such.

I'm not the only one with a dim view of the value of edited volumes. As I've expressed previously (" Why are so many edited volumes worthless? ") most edited volumes in archaeology are insufficiently integrated, have too many poor quality essays, and do a poor job of advancing research. I was thus not surprised to find the following comments in a recent book review published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. This was a review of " Comparing Cities: the Middle East and South Asia " (ed. by Ali and Rieker, Oxford Univ press, 2010. Review 2011, JRAI 17:671-672); review by Hayder Al-Mohammad: "one is left to wonder what this edited volume is hoping to respond to or push in terms of new resesarch, ideas, and methods." (p.671) " Comparing Cities should be a warning to future editors of volumes that readers require more than just a number of articles thrown together in one book to make it a worthy and coherent read." (p.672)...

Philosophers of science and social scientists have identified a variety of perspectives on the meaning of explanation and the ways scholars go about explaining social phenomena in the present and the past. I would guess that I am like many archaeologists in generally avoiding this literature because much of the work and writing is difficult to follow and difficult to relate to archaeology. But over the past couple of years I have become convinced that we need to pay attention to this material so that we can do a better job of explaining the past. I've talked about this issue previously, here , and here . Today I will point to two authors who do discuss issues of explanation, causality, and epistemology in a particularly clear fashion, and in ways that relate to archaeology: Daniel Little and Charles Tilly.   (1) Daniel Little is a philosopher of science who specializes in social science. He has an impressive record of publications (see below), and he writes with great clarity. I ...

The Research Works Act, H.R. 3699, is a bill that would make it illegal for researchers to post their own publications on the internet for public access. Guess who is behind this bill? Elsevier and the commercial publishing lobby (the Association of American Publishers). Steven Harnad's post: The Private Publishing Tail Trying To Wag The Public Research Dog, Yet Again contains the most detailed and useful discussion of the issue that I've seen. Michelle Clement's blog at Scientific American, Reseaerch Works Act would deny taxpayers access to federally funded research ., starts out, "Carolyn Maloney, a congresswoman funded by Elsevier, which is a major for-profit publishing company, is trying to pass the Research Works Act, which would deny Americans free access to research funded by taxpayer money." For more information about the bill and about WHAT U.S. CITIZENS CAN DO about this, see the Alliance for Taxpayer Access .

This allegory is from "Time for academics to withdraw free labor", on Dorothy Bishop's BishopBlog: Jack is a sheep farmer. He gets some government subsidies, and also works long hours to keep his sheep happy and healthy. When his beasts are ready for slaughter, he offers them to an abattoir. The abattoir is very choosy and may reject Jack’s sheep, which is a disaster for him, as there is no other route to the market. If he is lucky the abattoir will accept the animals, slaughter them and sell them, at a large profit, to the supermarket. Jack does not see any of this money. The populace struggle to afford the price of meat, but the government has no control over this. When Jack feels like a nice piece of lamb, he buys it from the supermarket. Meanwhile, Jack provides his services for free as an inspector of other farmers’ animals.   Crazy story, right? But that’s the model that academic publishing follows.......... See BishopBlog for more . Dorothy Bishop wants authors a...