Peter Suber at Open Access News reported that the American Anthropological Association (AAA) has decided to lobby against the “Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006″ (FRPAA) introduced by Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT). The bill would require open access dissemination of all peer-reviewed research findings that result from federally funded projects within 6 months of publication.

The AAA, along with several other scholarly societies, has decided that this bill threatens their publishing business model, and suggest that this bill would threaten quality and the peer-review process. This is a very unfortunate turn of events, given that the AAA represents many archaeologists.

In my opinion, their portrayal of Open Access is both misinformed and widely off the mark in terms of fiscal impacts. Open Access is completely consistent with peer-review, typically improves citation rates, and is often very competitive impact factors (PLoS Biology has an impact factor of 13.9, on the par of Science). Disciplines that already see a great deal of open access dissemination (math and physics through the Archiv.org pre-print service) still have thriving journals. Even publishers in these disciplines with extensive open access self-archiving report no evidence of reduced subscription rates. Peter Suber provides two important links that address most, if not all, objections to FRPAA:

Stevan Harnand: How to Counter All Opposition to the FRPAA Self-Archiving Mandate

Peter Suber: Comments on “Publishers oppose FRPAA“

More importantly, these societies, including the AAA are taking the low-ground of putting their printing business models ahead of the public interest. It is also poor politics, given that these communities depend on public financing and yet are refusing to grant public access to their findings! The AAA is now in the awkward position of fighting for continued access to NSF funding while rejecting public access to the outcomes of such funding.

Given the trends in continued scholarly-media consolidation and escalating publication costs, blocking the FRPAA also makes very bad business sense (independent researchers, faculty from small colleges, CRM archaeologists, students, etc. are finding current literature increasingly expensive to access).

The AAA ethical code is a bit less clear (on my reading) about responsibilities for public communication than the SAA ethical code. In contrast, the SAA has a very clear set of ethical principles to help guide the debate about Open Access. Open Access frameworks clearly work toward Principles 4, 5, and 6 of the SAA’s own ethical code. Open Access also has important positive implications for Stewardship, Accountability, Commercialization (the documentary record of the past should not be commoditized any more than physical remains) and Training. Clearly, the SAA can’t ignore these principles in response to this proposed legislation.

SAA members need to talk about these issues seriously.