Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Open Access Publishing

Something approaching 15% of all peer reviewed periodicals are open access. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) now lists 3009 journals meeting their selection criteria. There are not yet enough open access periodicals in ancient studies to suit my taste, but more are appearing all the time. Have a look at the DOAJ Subject Tree for a good view of what's available there.

Push your scholarship towards open access journals. Encourage your students, colleagues and teachers to publish in open access journals. Push postprint copies of your already published work to your institutional repositories.

If you have open access pubications, make sure you bring them to the attention of those people, like me, who maintain portals to or indexes of open access material. If you have open access publications on the ancient world, let me know, and I'll index them in Abzu.

And one more thing. Look at what institutions like The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, are doing - simultaneous publication on paper (for sale) and in online digital facsimile (for free), and working through their back list of both in print and out of print publications with the goal of building a complete set. Encourage other institutions to develop and implement comparable policies.

2 comments:

Steko said...

Things are getting always better and 15% is a really good situation, but is this proportion the same also in the field of ancient history and archaeology?

Chuck Jones said...

I haven't counted carfully, but my sense is that it's less than 15% in ancient history and archaeology.

Why, I wonder? There are certainly other open access journals in ancient history and archaeology than those listd in DOAR, but which fail to meet the criterial DOAR uses, principally a formally stated policy on peer review. Some of those journals would be eligible for inclusion if they stated their policy.