The Archaeological Institute of America has published a new update to its letter on Open Access.
My recent letter in ARCHAEOLOGY magazine has opened discussion concerning the AIA’s position on open access. I am personally opposed to slated government legislation on the issue. I am not against open access as a concept, however. The AIA itself already endorses open access through the extensive posting of content online, gratis, including articles and reviews from the American Journal of Archaeology, articles and interactive digs from ARCHAEOLOGY magazine, and resources for students such as field school and job placement listings.
Open access has become an increasingly important issue in academic publishing, and, as a non-profit learned society, the AIA wants to engage in the dialogue. We hope that through critical inquiry and debate we will be able to find ways to balance the interests of the public with those of our authors, our subscribers, and of the Institute itself.
–Elizabeth Bartman, President
A definite change it tone from “We at the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), along with our colleagues at the American Anthropological Association (the AAA are not against open access and have stated so several times on this blog, I thought I would make that clear here) and other learned societies, have taken a stand against open access”
Still leaves them against mandated Open Access. Also, I feel like they still are having some trouble with the concept of Open Access only being applied to publications – “interactive digs from ARCHAEOLOGY magazine, and resources for students such as field school and job placement listings”. While I would prefer that they also retract their opinion submitted to the White House this is probably the best we are going to get. Most likely OpenAccessArchaeology will stop its boycott of the AIA but that is getting ahead of ourselves. We will have to wait and see.
Doug's Archaeology 
May 25th, 2012 → 10:14 am
[…] that was not well received by some in the archaeology community, see my response. They eventually backtracked a little on the statement. In between that, me and the other people that run the website Open Access Archaeology decided we […]
September 14th, 2012 → 11:04 am
[…] I was asked to write about the AIA’s stance against Open Access ( I blog about it here and here and the boycott I organized here). Being as fair as I could stayed away from the controversy over […]