To mark Open Access Week 2015, we at Alexander Street would like to present our new hybrid Open Access archive database concept!

The following is an adapted excerpt from an essay originally published by David Parker, Senior Vice President of Alexander Street.

Innovation in Open Access Archives

At Alexander Street we have long seen making silent voices heard a central component of our mission. In the field of anthropology we know that the seminal ethnographies of the twentieth century that defined the discipline are underpinned by an enormous volume of un-published and un-digitized field notes, photos and other forms of ephemera. Our standard business practice has been to curate such un-digitized content and then to digitize, index and make salable; but the sheer volume of content in the corpus of twentieth century ethnography makes this nearly impossible, thus our exploration into open access alternatives. When we scanned the landscape of open access offerings in archives we found the vast majority to be government or institution-funded; the stand-out exception being the offerings of Reveal Digital, such the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee Digital Archive, 1960-1969. Reveal Digital uses a sales threshold approach that is based on establishing a revenue target after which the archive becomes open to all. This, of course, relies on the largesse and good will of the well-funded and/or philanthropic to bring important archives open to the world.

We are bringing forth a new open access model for archive publication. Our new collection, Anthropological Fieldwork Online, will bring open access archival content to the world by merging “for fee” and “for free” content into a single offering. Based on the preference of the many archives we are working with to digitize their fieldwork collections, we will present three alternatives side-by-side in one offering: for fee (traditional purchase or subscription), hybrid (for fee for an embargo period and then freely open) and sponsored open access on publication. We will return 10% of the “for fee” revenue we generate to digitizing and delivering content open access and we are encouraging the archives delivering content for fee to return a percentage of their royalty to digitizing and delivering open access content. From this pool of monies we will prioritize and digitize the archival content that the trustees want open access on publication and never salable. Our open access model builds on the fundamental proposition that content owners and trustees of archives have different objectives and some have varying levels of need to generate revenues to sustain their operations. Anthropological Fieldwork Online will represent these great previously unpublished ethnographic works in a single platform that will enable users to better analyze, connect and critique ethnographic primary sources in their historic context, while opening new channels of anthropological inquiry for future generations of scholars. 

To learn more about Anthropological Fieldwork Online, send us an email or stay tuned!