Suchergebnisse

This commentary seeks to engage the issue of 'impact' in social anthropology by scrutinising the topic of open access. Drawing on the discussions that took place at the interna- tional conference 'FAQs about Open Access: The Political Economy of Knowledge in Anthro- pology and Beyond', held in October 2014 in Madrid, we suggest that addressing the topic of open access allows a two-fold goal. On one hand, it elucidates that public debates about open access rely on a rather minimalist notion of openness that does not yield an adequate under- standing of what is at stake in those debates. On the other, we argue that expanding the notion of openness does not only allow us to revisit the debate concerning what we do as academics, how we do it and what its value is, but also to do so going beyond current notions of 'impact' and 'public value' underpinned by the principle of economic efficiency in a context of increas- ingly reduced research funds.

This publication is prior to the conference/workshop FAQs About Open Access – The Political Economy of Publishing in Anthropology and Beyond, held at Medialab-Prado (Madrid) on the 16th and 17th of October 2014. We, as conference conveners and members of the Research Group on Anthropology with a Public Orientation (GIAOP), are interested in the current debates about open access and it is out of that shared interest that this conference emerges. It has been more than a decade since the first declarations for open and free access to publicly-funded scientific knowledge were issued (the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002 and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access one year after). Even though the debate has proliferated with strength in the Anglo-American academia in the last few years, we think that the way in which it has done so is extremely narrow, limited to putting forth proposals for how to make academic publications available online —and generally not questioning the business models and the very academic practices that have led to "capture/enclose" knowledge in the first place.