Open Access and the Pacific

With thanks to the Savage Minds blog:

Open access is a growing trend in scholarly publishing, and a particularly important one enabling better access to scholarly work in the developing world. The Savage Minds blog has recently highlighted that some of the most focused journals on anthropology and the Pacific are available open access.


The blog author states: "These journals are small and specialized — despite the size of the Pacific, the scholarly community is pretty small — but despite this they are all being made more and more available online. Or maybe I should say because of this. I also think that we, like the physicists, are a group of people with a strong sense of community and a commitment to the values of our discipline — and the Pacific is a place where people value share and community."

Highlighted journals include Pacific Studies which has posted over thirty years of back issues available for free on its website; The Contemporary Pacific  which has placed over twenty years of its issues online; and
the University of the South Pacific's Journal of Pacific Studies which currently has 8 volumes of its back issues available open access and has abstracts and tables of contents for the remaining issues online, while work is ongoing to provide full text access to these.


At the University of Hawaii the Center for Pacific Island Studies has done a superb job of making its work available open access. It includes a occasional papers series that began with relatively staid titles like Pacific-Related Audiovisual Materials for Secondary Schools to truly new and exciting scholarship by Pacific Islanders such as Indigenous Encounters: Reflections on Relations Between People in the Pacific edited by Katerina Teaiwa and The Space Between: Negotiating Culture, Place, and Identity in the Pacific by Marata Tamaira.

For the full blog post please go here.