Insidehighered reports that the American Anthropological Association will be converting its journal Cultural Anthropology to an open-access format, accessible free of charge to anyone, as of January 2014. In addition to current material, the new format will also provide a 10-year backlog. Cultural Anthropology is the journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, a section of the AAA.
In the Insidehighered article, Charles the Cultural Anthropology’s editor, said that for this particular field, the move was unprecedented. “I don’t know of any other [open-access journals] in the interpretive social sciences; there’s certainly a lot of [open-access] science journals out there,” Piot said. “The sciences are in the lead on this … but in anthropology there’s nothing out there.”