Why Open Access is important

Jul 9, 2006 Alun Politics 6 Comments Bosnian Pyramid, Open Access, Publishing

[Cross-posted to Revise & Dis­sent]

While wait­ing for the pho­to­copier on Wed­nes­day I picked up Gar­rett Fagan’s art­icle on pseudoar­chae­ology in Archae­ology Magazine from a couple of years back. I’ve read with interest Cor­nelius Holtorf’s paper on Altern­at­ive Archae­olo­gies (free ver­sion is alas off­line, but you can read dis­cus­sion about the paper at Gra­ham Hancock’s site) and Kath­er­ine Reese’s book chapter from the per­spect­ive of a former believer. There’s a range of views, but one factor I think they’d all agree on is that there is a need to make inform­a­tion avail­able. Reese’s own response was to set up the In the Hall of Ma’at web­site, which Archae­ology repor­ted.

I think the Bos­nian Pyr­amid saga is an excel­lent example of what hap­pens when inform­a­tion isn’t access­ible. Here’s a quote from Osman­agic.

The civil­iz­a­tions did not migrate from Middle and West Europe, but from here toward them.

He is right.

On pyr­am­ids, ali­ens and whether experts he named com­ing to his site had been sent by Zahi Hawass or even been to Bos­nia, he’s wrong, but the claim that places like Bos­nia are hugely import­ant to European pre­his­tory is abso­lutely right. This is why many archae­olo­gists are hor­ri­fied that he’s dig­ging the site and the way he’s doing it. The idea that south-eastern Europe was the cul­tural and tech­no­lo­gical engine of Europe really isn’t dis­puted. It’s writ­ten in the land­scape at places like Karan­ovo below.

Tell at Karan­ovo. Photo by kind per­mis­sion of Raluca.

Above is a man-made hill cre­ated by thou­sands of years of occu­pa­tion. The bot­tom layer is the Stone Age. This was a place where people were farm­ing thou­sands of years before the idea caught on in places like the Brit­ish Isles. The layer above is labelled Chalko­lith­ikum, which isn’t the Bronze Age — It’s the Cop­per Age.

The Cop­per Age isn’t that well-known, mainly because a lot of places didn’t have one. It was a period before alloy­ing was dis­covered and people could have been work­ing nat­ive cop­per to begine with rather than smelt­ing. Once Bronze was dis­covered it sup­planted cop­per but for a while — for the tech­no­lo­gical pion­eers of Europe — a cop­per knife was the cut­ting edge of technology.

Later on it’s other places that shine. In the Aegean the Bronze Age cul­tures of Crete and Greece take off. From the east, per­haps the Ukraine, come a whole load of new ideas like horse rid­ing. But for a long, long while it was the south­east of Europe and the Balkans which were the centres of innovation.

The prob­lem, and it’s a big one, is access­ing that information.

The photo above is Karan­ovo, Bul­garia, which is quite a way from Bos­nia. There are closer sites, Lep­in­ski Vir, Ser­bia, which has some pho­tos on Flickr, and Star­cevo, Ser­bia which is a major site. But look­ing for inform­a­tion on the major sites of the region, the best I could find is this page on Vinca, also in Ser­bia on the Danube. I used the Karan­ovo photo by Raluca, who also has pho­tos of other neo­lithic sites from south­east Europe on his Flickr account, partly because it was an excel­lent photo, but also because of the sheer lack of mater­ial about south­east­ern sites online.

It’s a shame. Archae­olo­gists have got to grips with books recently. There have been some first rate access­ible and afford­able books by archae­olo­gists recently. After the Ice by Steve Mithen is the most obvi­ously use­ful book for the Bos­nian claims but there’s also The Molecule Hunt by Mar­tin Jones or Genes, Peoples and Lan­guages by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza. Unfor­tu­nately they haven’t really got to grips with the web yet. In terms of eas­ily access­ible inform­a­tion, the Balkans are sorely lacking.

Archae­olo­gical mater­ial is hid­den behind sub­scrip­tions. In my case my paper on Delphi will cost you £15, or over twice the cost of the Com­plete Works of Shakespeare. I don’t want to put you off, it’s amaz­ing, but twice as good as Shakespeare? I did think the idea of archae­olo­gists being exclu­sion­ary was para­noia, but if you look at the sheer cost of recently pub­lished mater­ial, then unin­ten­tion­ally or not the costs are a very effect­ive bar­rier to learn­ing. What you’re left with is a bunch of experts who are ask­ing people to exam­ine the evid­ence, use a crit­ical mind and if you want to exam­ine them be pre­pared to pay sac­ri­fice a major bod­ily organ to a shady trans­plant sur­geon to pay for the privilege.

From the inside it’s laugh­able to think that archae­ology is about money or power, but if people will pub­lish their work in books like this (£230 is about $430, but you can save $100 order­ing from Amazon US), then it’s clear that someone is mak­ing money.

Osman­agic is able to make his claims because the inform­a­tion archae­olo­gists have about the region is so dif­fi­cult to find. He can make claims about oppos­i­tion being jeal­ous due to money because if any­one did, for instance care to check what I said about Karan­ovo, they could pay hun­dreds of pounds / dol­lars / euros to find out, or else live near a stag­ger­ingly effi­cient lib­rary. For all that can be said about Osman­agic, aca­dem­ics are the people who have cre­ated the con­di­tions in which he can flour­ish. The events in Bos­nia should cause some people to reflect on how this came to be, but whether or not it will is another matter.

In light of all that it’s great news that the EAA journal is encour­aging review­ers to self-publish their reviews to the web after a one-year embargo. There’s also the Amer­ican Journal of Archae­ology avail­able online. As for my work, you can read an over­view (in Eng­lish, Greek, Hun­garian and Italian) or else read a series of posts on it.