The NY Times may have grasped the new economics of open publishing, but the American Anthropological Association has recently announced a new partnership with Wiley-Blackwell to distribute the Association’s 23 journals, newsletters, and research portal AnthroSource.
Peter Suber has predicted that the open news trend will not spill over into scholarly journal publishing, arguing that scholarly journals cannot raise as much money from advertising even though they have lower costs. Suber also notes, however, that user expectations for free online access and heightened impact may eventually have an indirect effect on scholarly journals.
The AAA has acted in accord with their vested interests, but not necessarily in the interests of their profession or the general public. A comment on the Chronicle notes:
Let’s be clear about what is going on here: the AAA is using a private publisher to extract income from universities through their libraries. The bad news though is that university libraries will not be able to afford these increases. In the end fewer subscriptions will be sold and fewer people will have access to this scholarship. If the AAA really cared about scholarship in anthropology they would be pursuing an open access strategy.