Welcome to Open Access Resources for Asian American Studies!
This website introduces Asian American Studies scholars, students, and advocates to open access (OA) resources relevant to the field of Asian American Studies.
What is Open Access?
The open access movement seeks to remove barriers to access to scholarly communication. It is an alternative to the subscription-based model that currently dominates academic publishing. Publishers play a mediating role in the academic publishing industry, between the scholars who write and edit articles and the academic institutions who purchase journals through their library systems, by collecting, packaging, and disseminating the articles (McGuigan and Russell). In essence, the producers and consumers of scholarly literature in this model are the same groups of people: faculty, researchers and students of academic institutions. While the producers have not seen a significant increase in their compensation for authorship and editorial services, as consumers, academic libraries have had to cope with ever increasing prices for academic journals (or serials) with continuing budget constraints. The open access movement developed in part as a response to this serials crisis.
The Budapest Open Access Initiative, the fruit of the first international conference on the subject, describes open access scholarly communication by "its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself." More succinctly, in the words of Peter Suber, open access literature is "digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions."
Open access manifests in two complementary models: open access journals (gold OA) and open access repositories (green OA). Gold OA is "where journals provide OA to their articles (either by charging the author-institution for refereeing/publishing outgoing articles instead of charging the user-institution for accessing incoming articles, or by simply making their online edition free for all)." Green OA is "where authors provide OA to their own published articles, by making their own eprints free for all."
To learn more about open access, please see Peter Suber's Open Access Overview.
What is Asian American Studies?
Asian American Studies is the discipline that examines the experience of Asians in the United States through multidisciplinary lenses. In addition to exploring the experience of the peoples from the multitude of Asian countries and cultures living in the US, AAS also adopts a comparative approach, looking at the experience of peoples of African, European, Latino and native heritage.
Asian American Studies is a relatively young discipline, established only in 1969 at San Francisco State College and the University of California, Berkeley. The Third World movement of that milieu mobilized several communities of color to demand an education that served and was relevant to them. The movement spread to other parts of the country, and by the 1980s, Asian American Studies (sometimes under the broader discipline of Ethnic Studies) were founded at many higher education institutions, mostly on the West Coast. In the 1990s, the discipline was re-energized with the growth of AAS programs eastward and with the development of Asian American student unions.
To learn more about Asian American Studies, please see the subject guides listed on the Subject Guides page.
Why is Open Access Important to Asian American Studies?
An anecdote first:
When I was an intern at the Asian American Arts Centre some summers ago, the program manager was doing preliminary research, trying to organize a show by Vietnamese American artists from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I can no longer remember the title of the article or the journal, but I still remember her asking me to access my university's library database to download and send her a specific article. I still remember that was the first time I used Project MUSE. I didn't think much of it at the time, but it has become clear to me since that that incident is a symptom of how the status of Asian American academic literature is at odds with the origin story of the discipline.
Asian American Studies is a discipline with community roots, a discipline that came from challenging the status quo, a discipline that took ownership of its own cultures and identities and created an alternative body of knowledge that can be further dissected and disseminated. As such, confining academic literature to those with academic credentials conflicts with the core values of those who are most enthusiastic about the field.
As an academic discipline, Asian American Studies produces a fraction of the research and literature that other social science and humanities disciplines produce, as surmised by the scarcity of journals devoted to the discipline, open access or not. Perhaps publishers want to hold on to the little profit they do make from the journal subscriptions and scholars have only a handful of journals to which they can submit their work. A cursory Google search shows that there is no critical mass of Asian American students or advocates pushing for open access; in fact, there seems to be no momentum at all. This may be attributed to the lack of visibility of Asian American Studies scholarly communication on the whole.
Open access can raise that visibility. For scholars, open access can:
- Increases readers’ ability to find use relevant literature
- Increases the visibility, readership and impact of author’s works
- Creates new avenues for discovery in digital environment
- Enhances interdisciplinary research
- Accelerates the pace of research, discovery and innovation (SPARC)
For Asian American Studies programs, open access can:
- Contributes to core mission of advancing knowledge
- Democratizes access – regardless of size or budget of the program or institution
- Increases competitiveness of the program and the institution (SPARC)
More broadly, for the Asian American public and all who are interested in the field, open access can:
- Provides access to previously unavailable materials relating to health, energy, environment, and other areas of broad interest
- Creates better educated populace
- Encourages support and engagement of the field (SPARC)
According to the 2010 US census, Asian Americans are the fastest growing demographic in the United States. More Asian Americans are finding themselves in the national spotlight in technology, media and politics. As this trend continues, there will be a need for Asian Americans to learn about where they came from, how their identity was shaped, and the issues that affect their lives. Open access can be key to disseminating this knowledge and to connecting the past with the future.
Last updated: June 11, 2011
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License
