Dear Colleagues,
I'm writing to you today as President of the American Anthropological Association. AAA's Executive Board voted in May 2017 to develop an open access repository and tasked the Publishing Futures Committee (PFC) with looking into viable options and making a recommendation to the Board. The PFC developed a list of potential providers-both commercial and not-for-profit. After reviewing the benefits and disadvantages of each platform (two commercial and two open source), the PFC overwhelmingly recommended using Atypon's Literatum platform to the Executive Board.
The PFC thoroughly investigated using an open source platform, but doing so would increase both the initial implementation costs and the ongoing operating costs substantially, and thereby jeopardize the AAA's ability to offer a free global resource that would remain stable and reliable in the longer term. Open source platforms require significant staff and financial resources to build and maintain--when new features are available, AAA would need to fund their inclusion and make sure that each upgrade remained compatible with existing content, legacy file formats, languages and diacritical marks. Certainly this could change with time, but for now those maintenance costs-even more than initial development costs, which would also be greater for open source platforms-were daunting. The two commercial providers were deemed far more capable and advanced in their offerings, and the support available for both users and AAA staff was appealing. These platforms also allow more rapid development, so the repository can begin serving the needs of anthropologists sooner. The PFC, as noted above, made a recommendation for the Executive Board to select the Literatum platform; the pros and cons of each provider were provided to the Executive Board and informed its discussion.
The Executive Board voted unanimously to use Atypon to develop an open access anthropology repository. Atypon is a vendor, and has rights to neither the content nor the metadata associated with the repository.
Our main objective is simply to have a robust, user-friendly, feature-rich, and sustainable resource, and make it available as soon as possible. We've waited until we could establish an international advisory board to ensure the repository grows in ways that benefit all anthropologists, everywhere, and now we're looking forward to launching the repository as soon as possible. We hope it will help all anthropologists promote and preserve their work, and aid in the global circulation of anthropological knowledge.
We invite you to read the FAQ<https://www.americananthro.org/StayInformed/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=24311> and if you have additional questions, please write [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>.
All my best,
Alec
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Alex W. Barker
President, American Anthropological Association
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