Sunday, June 22, 2008

Open Access Anthropology

The new journal, Open Access Anthropology, is now up and running. Out of 3 articles, there is one archaeology paper:

The Anatolian Clay Sealing: The First Quality Assurance System of Human History? Authors: Anna Maria Ravagnan, Enzo Grossi. Open Access Anthropology 1:11-13.

This commercial journal charges authors between $600 and $900 to publish articles, which are peer reviewed. The journal home page has a link for "endorsements," which consist of a bunch of quotes about how great Open Access journals are (in general).

Open Access is important, and I am definitely in favor of it. But I'm not anxious to start forking over hundreds of dollars to publish my papers in new, untried journals ("Gold OA"). The quicker and less expensive route is self-archiving, known as Green OA. I remain baffled why more archaeologists (and their home institutions) aren't moving toward institutional repositories and self-archiving.

If you are new to this, please check out some of Stevan Harnad's papers. Is there any reason at all not to do this ??????

ADDENDUM (Added July 15, 2008). "Open Anthropology" is published by Bentham Science Publishers. For some context on their for-profit OA journals, see Richard Poynder's interview with one of their executives.

No comments: