Bonnie Pitblado

March 1, 2022

With field work primarily based in Colorado, Bonnie Pitblado is an archaeologist who has spent more than 25 years exploring the relationship between the earliest Indigenous people and the high altitude environments of the Rockies. She is passionately dedicated to public archaeology and sharing her work with the public. This includes founding and directing OKPAN, the Oklahoma Public Archaeology Network, which sponsors a wide range of statewide programs, including archaeology conferences and workshops, curricula development for K – 12 classrooms, and more. It also includes publishing her work openly and advocating for open access publishing. Her openly published articles include "On Rehumanizing Pleistocene People of the Western Hemisphere" and "The dangers of conflating responsible and responsive artifact stewardship with illicit and illegal collecting."   

 Why do you choose to publish open access?

I have always advocated for maximum inclusivity and access for the archaeological work I am privileged to do. So many people beyond the walls of the Academy are vested in and care about what we do. I want all of them to be able to read what I have to say without encountering paywalls.   

 Currently the Libraries has read-and-publish agreements with Cambridge and Oxford university presses. What do you see as the value to authors and the university when the Libraries' enters into such agreements?

The value is phenomenal to me, but I think that value ripples outward in important ways. As I mentioned above, I feel so strongly that our work should be accessible that I have chosen to pay $1,000 or more in author fees to ensure that it is. In the past few months, I have published a couple of pieces through OU's Cambridge read-and-publish agreement. I'd have paid for both to be open access on my own, so I am immensely grateful for an agreement that has OU covering those costs. I love feeling like the University stands behind me in my commitment to share my work.  

 How do you think open access supports diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts?

The paywalls that non-academics encounter when they try to access most of our work create barriers that reinforce inequity. How and why is it reasonable to expect that Jane-Q-Public will shell out $40+ to read a single paywalled article? How does that allow us as academics to advance our work beyond the Academy? How does that NOT ensure that those with the fewest resources have the least access to data and interpretations that are usually publicly funded?   

I recently used open access to publish an article featuring the thoughts of several Indigenous colleagues. I did not want my name to appear on the article, because I wanted to elevate their voices. I worried that this might make the piece ineligible for open-access publication through a read-and-publish agreement, but I was thrilled to learn that it didn't. We didn't ultimately use OU's agreement for that paper, because one of the other authors was also at a university with that same agreement with the press. But the principle is the same, and it excited me to find a way to use university resources to help amplify colleagues' voices who might otherwise themselves be stuck behind a paywall.   

 Would you encourage others to publish open access? If yes, why?

Absolutely. If I could wave a wand and abolish paywalls forever, I would do it. If read-and-publish agreements are the workaround for now, then we should all be using it at every single opportunity. More access = more impact. For me, caring as I do increasingly about impact outside the academy, open access is pure gold. But it helps colleagues inside it, and without affiliations and therefore access to university libraries, just as much.