Society for Applied Anthropology 1 SfAA President’s Column By Merrill Eisenberg [Merrill@u.arizona.edu] University of Arizona s your new President I want to first thank you all for your support. I am indeed very honored to be sitting in this position and promise you that serving you and the Society will be my highest priority over the next two years. My job is made much easier by my predecessor Allan Burns, the volunteer efforts of our Board of Directors and committee members, and our staff at PMA, Tom, Neil, Melissa, and Trish. I inherit an organization that is in excellent shape with regard to financial position, membership, enthusiasm, and engagement. Thanks to Darby Stapp and his capable Program Committee, the 2011 Seattle meetings set a new standard not only for our regular attendees, but for the communities surrounding the conference site as well. The Food Summit was an outstanding success, and our community forums in three outlying Washington cities were well attended and received. The Seattle meetings will be a hard act to follow, but I have full confidence that our Program Chair for Baltimore, Bill Roberts, will rise to the occasion! An upcoming challenge for SfAA As rosy as the current status of SfAA is, there are potential clouds on the horizon that require the attention of your organization‘s leadership. One of these is the ―open access‖ (OA) publishing model. If you haven‘t yet been exposed to this issue, OA publications are freely available to anyone, anywhere, with no charges for access. Sounds like a great idea on the surface, and I would have to agree that my own values support the idea of making scholarly work freely available. Libraries are also thrilled with the prospect of OA publication since the price of institutional subscriptions to academic journals have been rising while library budgets are falling. Many libraries have reduced the number of subscriptions they provide and/or have stopped purchasing publication bundles offered by publishers. The NIH has embraced OA and now requires authors whose work was funded by them to submit final manuscripts that have been accepted for publication to their digital archive system, PubMed Central. Clearly the trend is for all journals to move to an OA publishing model. The OA model, while based on laudable ideals, poses a real problem for societies and associations that publish scholarly journals, including SfAA. Library subscriptions and non-subscriber purchase of articles from Human Organization and Practicing Anthropology, our two journals, account for approximately 20% of our revenues. We depend on that money for production of the journals as well as for the day-to-day operation of our Society. In keeping with industry trends, we have seen subscription revenues decreasing over the past few years. If they were to disappear entirely, our financial standing would be seriously compromised. Some scholarly societies and associations have dealt with this problem by charging authors to publish in their journal, a practice that creates barriers to publishing and will impact promotion and tenure practices. This is not a solution the SfAA Board supports. Therefore, the Board, in collaboration with the Publications Committee, will be exploring this issue in depth. We want our journals to be accessible to all, but we need to develop an alternative funding stream for production of the journals and to support Society activities. I will keep you informed about this issue as we move forward. A Volume 22, Number 2 May 2011 Merrill Eisenberg