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Charles Watkinson
(See email contacts page for the author's email address.)
Inspired by Nick Eiteljorg's essay on the electronic monograph in the Winter, 2008 issue of the CSA Newsletter, this paper discusses the impact of electronic technologies on a particular species of monographic publication, the archaeological site report.1 Mr. Eiteljorg's distinction when defining "electronic publication" between "an electronic version of a scholarly monograph and the presentation of data—either as whole, downloadable files or as online responses to queries from a web resource" highlights the unique status of the site report within the world of monograph publishing. Site reports traditionally aim to meet both of these goals: to provide a synthetic overview and to present the data it is based on. In publishing terms, this makes site reports a hybrid monograph and reference book, and thus a famously difficult animal to deal with.
In his excellent recent study of monograph publishing, Books in the Digital Age, the Cambridge sociologist John B. Thompson identifies six respects in which new technologies can enable content providers to add real value to content.2 These are ease of access, updatability, scale, searchability, intertextuality (interoperability), and multimedia—all concepts that will be returned to below. However, there are aspects of "archaeology's publication problem" that are not amenable to mere technological solutions. In some cases these will even be complicated by the arrival of new technology.
Even though I have now spent 15 years hanging around the world of archaeological publishing, the problems that the discipline faces remain hard to understand. Some are common across the world of scholarly communications, such as the contraction of the monograph market and the changing face of tenure review. Others are discipline-specific, such as the challenge posed by the exponential increase in the quantity and types of data that archaeological projects are collecting. All are the subject of reports, white papers, committee minutes, surveys, and seminars -- a growing body of literature that too often does not spread across disciplinary or national boundaries.
In the face of all this analysis, this brief discussion can only scrape the surface. In the following sections, I present some thoughts about the nature of "archaeology's publication problem" and the changing aspect of this problem as digital technologies become increasingly imbedded in the discipline. My comments explore the problem from the different perspectives of authors, publishers, and users.
It often takes many years for archaeologists to submit their site reports for publication. Over a decade ago, a series of papers on biblical archaeology, entitled Archaeology's Publication Problem,3 referred to the failure of archaeologists to publish definitive accounts of their excavations in a timely way as "archaeology's dirty secret." In one of the contributions, Ze'ev Herzog estimated that only 19% of excavations conducted in the Syro-Palestinian region prior to ten years previously (that is, between 1890 and 1989) could be regarded as fully published; more than half had no publications, and these figures did not include rescue excavations -- likely to be even more poorly published than the big digs. In the discipline's leading textbook, Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn report that only an estimated 40% of modern excavations in Britain had been published ten years after completion, and only 27% of the digs funded by the National Science Foundation since 1950 have ever reached print.4
The problem is curiously intractable, even in the face of increasingly severe sanctions. As Roger Atwood has recently reported in Archaeology magazine, the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Egyptian and Cypriot governments, have increasingly cracked down on projects they believe have not published promptly enough.5 Similar policies exist at governmental and institutional level in many other countries, although they are not always consistently enforced.
So why does it take authors so long to bring archaeological fieldwork to publication?
For the contributors to Archaeology's Publication Problem, the largest issue leading to delay was the sheer quantity and diversity of data generated by scientifically-conducted excavation, and the consequent length and tedium involved in analysis. Examining archaeology from outside the discipline, the informatician Jingfeng Xia marvels at "how much energy, time, and money must be invested to bring one item from the soil to publication."6
Another issue raised in Archaeology's Publication Problem was the diverse obligations of archaeologists to teach and fundraise, as well as dig. Alexander Joffe, in his review of the book, built on this complaint to explore some other societal aspects of the problem, especially "the prevailing ideology that 'real' archaeologists do field work and run projects" rather than sitting in the library, the "size fetish of excavations," and the persistence of the idea that a single scholar should wrestle the data to the ground, against the logic of collaboration (as Joffe notes, "no one can, or should, do it alone, and to think otherwise is simply hubris").7
The unwillingness of archaeologists to collaborate in publication or share their data has a number of social and psychological aspects. It is not only a case of secret knowledge being power. Sometimes archaeologists can't share data because there are other claims on the research. (Perhaps it has to be announced first through a delayed publication in the host country; perhaps they have to get the approval of their collaborators.) Sometimes the data is confidential or sensitive. Occasionally, an obsession with getting the presentation "perfect" prevents any publication -- the best as enemy of the good.8
Joffe also explored the nature of financial incentives in his review of Archaeology's Publication Problem, suggesting that "part of the problem also stems from the political economy of biblical archaeology, where a few manipulative philanthropists have been happy to spend money to put the tanned and good-looking in the field but not so interested in supporting the years of tedium required to produce a report."9 While this seems harsh, the idea that archaeologists are generally paid to find things rather than write can be widely accepted. It is particularly relevant in the case of freelance specialists, who will often be paid to come and catalogue a particular class of artifact but then receive no funding to prepare a report for publication.10 The main recommendation of James H. Ottaway's survey of the publication problem, published in 2002 as "Publish or Be Damned," was "for leaders of the profession to seek new sources of much-needed funding to implement much-needed higher standards of publications discipline."11 This report presented interviews with scholars working around the Mediterranean, including a number connected with the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, of which Mr. Ottaway is a Trustee.
Can digital technologies help authors bring archaeological fieldwork to speedier publication?
Clearly there are some issues affecting authors that technology can have little effect on. Incentivizing financial carrots and punishing legal and governmental sticks will just have to continue to be the major weapons for changing behavior. In some areas, digital technology can have an indirect impact, gradually changing disciplinary norms. An example is in the area of collaborating to produce publications, identified above as a major stumbling block. This is an area where the internet presents an ideal conduit for sharing data and working across geographic and disciplinary divides. A recent report concerning the application of technology in the humanities "expressed hope that an investment in cyberinfrastructure would allow humanists and social scientists to 'conduct new types of research in new ways.' To take advantage of the technology, one must engage directly with it, and one must allow traditions of practice to be flexibly influenced by it. One such tradition in the humanities is that of 'the individual genius'."12
In other areas, digital technology seems more immediately beneficial. The availability of databases and repositories offering virtually unlimited storage space for digital materials makes it easier to manage and store data. Although Mr. Eiteljorg bemoans the absence of archival repositories, they are increasingly available, as shown on the Repository 66 map, which currently lists over 1,000 worldwide.13 Standing aside from issues surrounding disciplinary vs. institutional repositories, mandates vs. incentives for voluntary deposit, the availability of somewhere durable to place data does not, however, remove the author's responsibility to process the information they have retrieved and filter it for publication. Electronic technologies do not remove the need for such filtering. They can make moving between filtered and unfiltered materials easier, but the lack of methodological standardization in the discipline means that all archaeological data needs to be processed and tagged in some way to be comprehensible to the reader. Otherwise the dream of being able to "drill down" from synthesis, through specialist reports, to the data itself is unreachable.14
Way back in 1983, the "Cunliffe Report" on The Publication of Archaeological Excavations outlined a policy of selectivity in excavation and post-excavation, and a multi-level dissemination strategy where only the most synthetic and interpretive parts were formally "published." The report's aim was to stimulate the more rapid and concise publication of archaeological work in Britain. From the Ground Up, a user needs survey conducted by the Council for British Archaeology and published in 2001, highlighted "the fallacy of 'preservation by record,' whereby a printed report was expected to contain all information necessary to reconstruct the deposits or fabric which had been disaggregated" and advocated a form and scale of publication governed by the significance and scale or the results, and the application of multiple forms and media of dissemination.15 However, the increasing size of excavation reports submitted on paper make it clear that lack of selectivity in the digital age is a problem that remains.
One reason for this is the lack of willingness to acknowledge electronic scholarship in tenure reviews and job advancement. Alexander Joffe has identified this issue as a crucial barrier to electronic publications, noting that "the model, a big beautiful book that everyone cites forever, is fixed in our heads"16 and that "until sales of silver disks or hits on a web site become as meaningful measures of scholarly effectiveness as refereed publications or citation indexes, archaeology will not avail itself of technologies that have the potential to break the logjam of publication."17
Authorial and review board skepticism about the value of electronic publication in tenure is, however, changing, partly due to the lobbying efforts of organizations like the Modern Languages Association and AIA/APA Working Group,18 partly due to the fact that more and more electronic publications are now taking the peer-review process seriously, and increasingly because digital scholarship is at last contributing to the central questions of the discipline rather than being defined by the fact that it involves computers. Although it has done much to demonstrate the power of digital technologies in archaeology, the success of the journal Internet Archaeology should perhaps be judged by how soon it disappears; rendered obsolete by the complete integration of electronic technologies into the fabric of scholarship. A journal whose subject matter is defined by the medium it appears in, rather than the subject matter of the articles that appear in it, will need to gradually reinvent itself—perhaps as the publisher of multiple electronic monographs or several e-enabled disciplinary journals.
The fact that the market for scholarly monographs has declined rapidly in the past 20 years is familiar to most scholars. Although the exact reasons for the decline are debated, shrinking library budgets being used to pay for increasingly expensive journal subscriptions in the sciences are partly to blame. John Thompson suggests that the unit sales of scholarly monographs have fallen to a quarter or less of what they were in the 1970s.19 Surveying a shorter period, a 2006 report suggests that sales of art history-related titles published by academic presses have declined, on average, by about 38% since the mid-1990s.20
The small size of the market for archaeology in particular can be gleaned from the fact that between 1989 and 2000 university presses only produced 162 archaeology titles, as opposed to 1,150 in classical languages and literature.21 And most of these were undoubtedly not even site reports. The reality of today's market for archaeological site reports is that a publisher like the American School of Classical Studies at Athens can expect to sell only between 300 and 500 copies over a period of 3 years -- the time over which most publishers attempt to write-off their investment.
If, from the perspective of publishers, half the problem with publishing archaeological site reports is with low demand, the other half is with high costs. These costs are mostly in labor; in ensuring that both the visual and textual records are as correct as possible, and presented to a standard at which they can be re-used by other scholars.
Archaeological reports are image-intensive, full of figures that have to be typeset at particular scales. Jingfeng Xia suggests that a particular feature of archaeologists is that they "usually trust their own visual inspection of objects rather than counting on the textual narratives of other scholars in carrying out their analysis."22 It is certainly true that certain groups, especially pottery scholars, seem to start in the plates section of a traditional archaeological report, and move to the text as a secondary resource. In addition, digital technologies put into the hands of authors a number of new tools, not only for the creation of images but also for the creation of complex multimedia visuals (such as video, CAD models, QTVRs). While new visual representations of data have the potential to revolutionize archaeology, they present new complexities to publishers; not only in accurately reproducing what has been supplied, but also in archiving digital objects often involving hundreds of linked files produced in multiple proprietary formats. Most publishers will admit that digital art is their biggest production challenge. While efficient workflows for handling photographic prints or transparencies, for example, are well-established, even simple digital imagery presents new challenges daily and therefore actually results in a higher expenditure in time and thus money than in the pre-digital era.
Producing archaeological site reports also involves a large amount of editorial intervention, for example in checking multiple cross-references between catalogue entries and a deposit summary, between maps and the text, between figures and the discussion of them. At least 60% of the total costs of production can come from the editorial and proofreading stages.
A survey of university presses who publish art history conducted in 2006, suggested that the average cost of publishing an average art history monograph (of around 300 pages, with 90 mixed b/w and color illustrations) was $41,400, 80% more than the cost of an unillustrated book (on average $23,000). These costs do not include paying for permissions, as many art history editors also have to do.23
All this editorial work and image manipulation takes time. Once a manuscript is ready to be edited and typeset, most publishers aim to produce books within a year.24 But this assumes that there is no queue, and that the manuscript is relatively straightforward. The small number of publishers still producing archaeological site reports means that not encountering a backlog is somewhat unlikely, and a production process taking several years is not unknown.
Electronic technologies may have a major impact on the precesses, timing, and costs outlined above. Software such as Quark and InDesign allows a single, skilled individual to handle all aspects of the production process from a personal computer, rather than involving many specialist departments. Such a person must have significant skills, however, and moving into a digital setting will not change the careful editing requirements. The end result may be either a digital presentation or print-on-demand or short-run paper products. (Issues regarding printed image quality need to be sorted out for printed output.) Print-on-demand and short-run digital printing will have a substantial impact on inventory storage costs for art history and archaeology publishers in the same way as they have already done in the world of less image-critical publishing. In addition, the opening of new distribution channels such as Amazon.com have released a "long tail" of specialist books from the obscurity to which they were previously consigned.
The process of digital preparation may be more efficient, and there can be definite cost savings, especially if publication is only digital. But the level of the savings may be smaller than many people think. In 1999 the then-Director of the University of Michigan Press estimated that the conventional "delivery mechanism," involving printing, binding, shipping and warehousing, amounted to 25% of the total cost of scholarly monographs. Depending on the costs of the replacement digital delivery mechanism, a saving of 20% might be realized.25
The increasingly widespread use of the term "scholarly communication" instead of "scholarly publishing" reflects the fact that digital technologies offer a whole array of other channels for sharing information. These range along a continuum from formal to informal, and they all have their place. At the most formal end of this spectrum, the term "publishing" describes "activity that fixes knowledge in a durable medium for enhanced dissemination and use."26 Publishing is also a process with four information functions; to register authors' claims and priority (to fix, at the point of manuscript acceptance, the point at which they "got there first"); to certify the quality of the work through peer review and validate it through editorial and productions processes; to disseminate the information (most importantly to "narrow cast" this information to the colleagues who matter); and to archive a definitive "version of record" so that it will endure, and can be reused in future scholarship.
At the most informal end of the continuum are wikis, blogs, list-servs and other forums for discussion. They lack the fixity of the published version. This creates challenges for scholars attempting to cite them, but it is also the essence of their usefulness. Although there has been much discussion of new "metrics of trust" to replace formal peer-review (in the case of Wikipedia for example), and even though peer review itself has many critics, these venues also currently lack a clear stamp of quality.27 Working paper sites and pre-print servers are a more formal venue for scholarly communication, and their role in classical studies has been recently discussed in Hesperia by the creators of the Princeton Stanford Working Papers in the Classics (PSWPC).28 While displaying unedited papers as soon as they are in a fairly complete form fulfills the authors' need for "registration," the PSWPC site can only fulfill the "certification and validation" role by restricting posting rights to members of a limited, Ivy League, community of scholars. Even in the age of Google, the act of "making available" is not equivalent to "dissemination," as discussed further below. While this can be overcome by a change of policy, the PSWPC site does not serve the role of "archiving" since working paper versions are removed when the materials are formally published. In short, while it presents another useful venue for discussion, and meets some of the needs of scholars in terms of making their work available sooner, the PSWPC site does not fulfill the most prominent need of real-life scholars; for prestige, recognition, and career advancement. The sharing of preprints is a good idea, whether through specific Working Paper sites, through institutional repositories, or through the increasing number of journals that will post versions of articles at the point of acceptance, as well as after production. On his blog, the Mesoamerican archaeologist Michael E. Smith has recently evaluated the pros and cons of working paper sites for archaeology, concluding that his "hunch is that with the direction in which scholarly publishing and internet scholarship are heading, working papers will become more popular and will play in increasing role in archaeological scholarship and publishing."29
While he is right about their increasing role in archaeological scholarship, working papers are no substitute for formal publication.Although they facilitate new kinds of informal information sharing, I would suggest that digital technologies have not had a substantial impact on solving the time and cost problems that beset the formal publication of archaeological site reports. Site reports are labor intensive to produce, and digital scholarship continually throws up new challenges that balance out any technological time savings.
In this context, it is worth making three further observations about the particular function of "publication" as a formal process in the context of archaeology. Firstly, that the role of copyediting is crucial when what is being prepared is meant to be, to a certain and selective extent (as discussed above), a printed surrogate for a site now destroyed by excavation. Secondly, that when discussing "dissemination," we should not ignore the whole information supply network and set of marketing tools that have been established over the last 100 years of publishing and librarianship. And, thirdly, that having a "version of record" remains an important benefit of the publishing process.
Authors are right to sometimes question the value that some aspects of copyediting and proofreading add, and publishers indeed still sometimes struggle to move beyond the design needs of a printed page to the semantic requirements of an electronic document. Copyediting is an art rather than science. It is an engagement between two people, each with different backgrounds and preconceptions, and there are bound to be gray areas. However, even the most apparently nitpicking edits (a comma moved, a date standardized) act to remove impediments for a reader who wants to clearly understand the author's argument or re-use data presented. Until recently, the important role that copyediting plays in validating scholarship has been underplayed, perhaps because the science publishers who are most vocal in the literature have tended to cut back on the copyediting function to save money. Recent studies, however, reaffirm its importance, and perhaps increasing importance, in a digital age where every reference is potentially a live link, and every catalogue entry may be queried by a distant digital repository.30
Dissemination remains more than merely "making public," and requires producer "push" as well as consumer "pull." In a world of information overload, traditional publishing activities, such as mounting conference displays, retain their value in alerting a key readership to new resources, while the preparation and broadcasting of accurate descriptive data has become perhaps even more labor intensive in the digital age where booksellers are just one of the channels through which information is bought and sold. Experiments with digital publication have so far underestimated the complexity and importance of the network that facilitates the dissemination of published information across a wide range of stakeholders, including libraries, booksellers, indexers, search engines, and review journals in many different countries. At the Mellon Foundation All Projects Archaeology Meeting in March 2008, my colleague Chuck Jones (now head librarian at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University) did a quick analysis during the seminar and informed the presenters that none of the electronic publications that were being displayed appeared in WorldCat, the global catalogue of library collections run by OCLC.31 In other words, by ignoring the traditional norms and channels of the information network, these important resources remained more or less invisible to scholars. Another example is suggested by the experience of e-Gutenberg, an experiment in born-digital publications conducted by Columbia University in collaboration with the American Historical Association, and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, where the lack of reviews in major journals forced the publishers to prepare print-on-demand versions of born-digital texts in order to provide publications that would be reviewed.32
The two functions of formal print mechanisms for updating data that must be preserved in the digital age are "trust" and "version control." While arguments for listening to multiple voices in our efforts to understand the past are powerful,33 the important role played by the specialist in analyzing the base data must still be acknowledged. While archaeological data benefits from regular examination and reinterpretation, the trail of evidence must be preserved at the very least so that the citation system continues to make sense. There is nothing about digital technologies that makes either trust or version control problematic: newer Wiki software is adept at tracking changes while posting restrictions or trust metrics can be incorporated to establish the relative authority of the participants.34 However, the ease with which electronic information can be updated should never be allowed to excuse carelessness in leaving a clear trail of versioning documentation.
To what extent have digital technologies solved "archaeology's publication problem" for publishers? The picture is mixed. While the production process has become more efficient, some new problems have been introduced, such as the increasing unpredictability of image quality in an age of new, and imperfectly understood, author tools. The human labor involved in reviewing, copyediting, and proofreading a complex archaeological text is still substantially the same, and the increase in the number of channels that require feeding with information has pushed up the demand for marketing—even as the opportunities for disseminating information have improved.
For mainstream, formally-published literature, electronic availability has made a huge difference in user accessibility. It is absolutely true that readers may find that the full-text of the products of formal publishers presented online are placed behind subscriber-only barriers, but titles and abstracts (or first pages where abstracts don't exist) are usually available. Accessing information that has cost someone money to process will never be free (the "open access" debate is merely about the re-allocation of costs from user-pays to producer-pays), but it could be suggested (at the risk of howls of reasonable protest) that ease of discoverability and reasonably-priced access to most scholarly resources online is becoming more and more of a reality even to independent scholars, an important group in archaeology whose interests have traditionally been ignored. For example, readers now have access to two thirds of the published content of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens online in full-text form, most of it through Google's digitization program or through JSTOR.
Readers have access to free versions of a number of ASCSA books through the Google Book Search program, though this program offers a "non optimal" experience, with PDFs that are of relatively low-quality and available for browsing only, rather than download (so as not cannibalize book sales to any significant extent). Readers using the National Academies Press website have had access to page-by-page downloading and free browsing of works since 1994; NAP data suggests that "lower-quality free content will lead not only to higher sales of e-content but also to higher sales of the printed format."35
Access to a more "optimal" presentation of ASCSA publications online is available through JSTOR, although in this case the coverage is limited by a three year embargo period. By the end of 2007, users of JSTOR could access 2,143 Hesperia articles, 32 Hesperia Supplements, and 31 volumes of monographic reports from the Athenian Agora excavations (Corinth is coming soon). The total JSTOR content available amounted to 3,954,112 articles from 1,108 journals in the fields of archaeology and related disciplines.36 Non-subscribers gained the option to purchase material in JSTOR on an article-by-article basis early in 2007 in reaction to the surprisingly large demand from individuals outside subscribing institutions after the database had been opened to Google indexing in 2006. The article-by-article pricing is set by publishers. While some are unrealistic, a $10 or $15 per article cost does not seem prohibitive for highly-relevant content.37 JSTOR is also leading the way in providing low-cost, or no-cost, access to institutions in developing nations. Access to published data from foreign teams has always been a problem to archaeologists in any host country. The barriers to access for this class of scholars are also rapidly coming down.
Access to some classes of archaeological publications remains difficult; "gray literature" is especially problematic.38 One of the great synthesizers of British prehistory, Richard Bradley, has recently argued that any survey that does not include the results of CRM or developer-funded research is likely to give a completely incorrect view of the past.39 However, he has only been able to compile his own syntheses through substantial funding for research assistants, who trawl through the piles of "Occasional Papers" or "Research Reports" buried in the basements of county libraries. The fact that most of these reports are not online is partly a matter of lack of investment in the infrastructure to host them, but also due to the secretive and risk-averse attitudes of the developer sponsors.
Scholars will have more access data from archaeological projects, and they will be increasingly available for query, given the increasing availability of repositories to hold data sets. As has been shown above, there may be societal and psychological reasons that a scholar may not want to share his or her data, and these obstacles are only indirectly affected by the advent of digital technologies (i.e., by boosting the spirit of collaboration). However, funders in the sciences now are more and more likely to require that, when a scholar is publishing an argument based on data, he or she should also present the underlying data. Data deposit may soon become mandatory for research funded by US agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. The publication of such "supplementary data" is also starting to become more common in archaeology.40 Quite apart from the intellectual property concerns that have traditionally been a barrier to data sharing, there are major issues, however, concerning whose responsibility it is to archive the sometimes complex materials that an author may need to attach to his or her article. If the responsibility lies on the author's institutional repository, for example, what happens when that author moves to a different university? An increasing number of studies are showing that the incidence of "bad links" is alarmingly high, and third party archives for scholarly content (like portico.org) are spending thousands of dollars in trying to ensure that supplementary data remain durable.41
Back in 1998 and 1999 the reviewers of Archaeology's Publication Problem were optimistic about the promise of electronic technologies for solving the problems of archaeological publication, and criticized the work for its lack of attention to matters digital. In his review, for example, Brian Fagan noted that he found it "a conservative book, with little new to say, especially about new electronic formats for presenting basic data." He predicted "a new era of electronic archives and digital imaging, which will allow fellow researchers free access to field and laboratory data in cyberspace." A decade later, in 2008, Nick Eiteljorg has wondered whether the electronic monograph is in fact a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow that we are never destined to reach.
While the pot of gold may still be a ways off, the leprechauns should know that we are closer than they might think. My feeling is that a revolution is indeed taking place in scholarly communication in archaeology but that formal publication is not the area that will be most affected. The formal process of "publication" has a credentialing role in the discipline that comes exactly from the fact that so much labor and cost has been expended, and it is unlikely that digital technologies can substitute for the human skills that the production process involves. As has happened in other data-heavy subjects like economics and astronomy, it is rather in the area of informal communication, in data mining repositories, in realizing interoperability between different excavation databases, and engaging in more collaborative work through Wikis and preprint servers, that the exciting possibilities are starting to be realized -- as other articles in the CSA Newsletter will make clear.
-- Charles Watkinson
1. Eiteljorg, H. II. 2008 "The Electronic Monograph: A Scholarly Necessity or the Never-Reached Pot of Gold at the End of the Rainbow," CSA Newsletter XX.3. http://csanet.org/newsletter/winter08/nlw0804.html. (Accessed September 20, 2008.) Return to text.
2. Thompson, J. B. 2005. Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States, Cambridge, pp. 318-320. A substantial preview is available at: http://books.google.com/books?id=zPt7g_cTweoC. (Accessed September 20, 2008.) Return to text.
3. Shanks, H. ed. 1996. Archaeology's Publication Problem, Washington, D.C. Return to text.
4. Renfew, A. C., and P. Bahn. 1991. Archaeology: Methods, Theory, and Practice, London, p. 408. Return to text.
5. Atwood, R. "Publish or Be Punished: Israel Cracks Down on Delinquent Diggers," Archaeology, March/April 2007, pp. 18-19. Return to text.
6. Xia, J. 2006. "Electronic Publishing in Archaeology," Journal of Scholarly Publishing 37.4, p. 271. Return to text.
7. Joffe, A. H. 1999. Review of Archaeology's Publication Problem, JNES 58, p. 279. Return to text.
8. Some of these motivations for not sharing data are discussed more in Ottaway, J. H. Jr. 2002. "Publish or Be Damned: Problems in Archaeological Publication," in Mauerschau: Festschrift für Manfred Korfmann, ed. R. Aslan, S. Blum, G. Kastl, F. Schweizer, and D. Thumm, Remshalden, pp. 1151. Return to text.
9. Joffe, A. H. 1999. Review of Archaeology's Publication Problem, JNES 58, p. 280. Return to text.
10. There are some notable exceptions. For example, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation has, for the last decade, generously funded scholars to prepare materials excavated by the Athenian Agora and Corinth excavations for publication. Return to text.
11. Ottaway, J. H. Jr. 2002. "Publish or Be Damned: Problems in Archaeological Publication," in Mauerschau: Festschrift für Manfred Korfmann, ed. R. Aslan, S. Blum, G. Kastl, F. Schweizer, and D. Thumm, Remshalden, pp. 1142-1151. Jim Ottaway has led by example, personally investing large sums of his own money to bring archaeological material to publication, and working as a Trustee of the Leon Levy-Shelby White Foundation to distribute over $3 million in funds to scholars publishing material from sites where excavation stopped more than five years previously. In the field of Aegean prehistory, Malcolm Wiener's Institute for Aegean Prehistory has been an extremely notable funder in this space. Return to text.
12. Unsworth, J. 2006. Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Washington, D.C. http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/OurCulturalCommonwealth.pdf. (Accessed September 20, 2008.) Return to text.
13. http://maps.repository66.org/. (Accessed September 20, 2008.) Return to text.
14. I have discussed this more on my blog, http://www.charleswatkinson.com/2008/03/drill-down-dilemma-why-cant-we-link.html. (Accessed September 20, 2008.) Return to text.
15. Jones, S., MacSween, A., Jeffrey, S., Morris, R., and M. Heyworth. 2001. From the Ground Up: The Publication of Archaeological Projects -- A User Needs Survey, York, http://www.britarch.ac.uk/pubs/puns/. (Accessed September 20, 2008.) Return to text.
16. Joffe, A. H. 1999. Review of Archaeology's Publication Problem, JNES 58, p. 280. Return to text.
17. Joffe, A. H. 1999. Review of Archaeology's Publication Problem, JNES 58, p. 281. Return to text.
18. Report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, http://www.mla.org/tenure_promotion (Accessed September 20, 2008.); APA/AIA Taskforce on Electronic Publication, http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pinax/APAAIATaskForce.html. (Accessed September 20, 2008.) Return to text.
19. Thompson, J. B. 2006. Books in the Digital Age, Cambridge, pp. 93-94. Return to text.
20. McGill, L. T. 2006. The State of Scholarly Publishing in the History of Art and Architecture: An Exploratory Report Funded by the Mellon Foundation, New York, p. 50. Return to text.
21. Greco, A. N., Rodriguez, C. E., and R. M. Wharton. 2007. The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century, Stanford, p. 70. Return to text.
22. Xia, J. 2006. "Electronic Publishing in Archaeology," Journal of Scholarly Publishing 37.4, p. 271. Return to text.
23. Ballon, H., and M. Westermann. 2006. Art History and Its Publications in the Electronic Age. Connexions, September 20, 2006. http://cnx.org/content/col10376/1.1/. (Accessed September 20, 2008.) Return to text.
24. Luey, B. ed. Revising Your Dissertation: Advice from Leading Editors, Berkeley, p. 243. Return to text.
25. Day, C. 1999. "Digital Alternatives: Solving the Problem or Shifting the Costs," in M. Case ed. The Specialized Monograph in Crisis: Or How Can I Get Tenure if You Won't Publish My Book, Washington , D.C. http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/specscholmono/day.shtml. (Accessed September 20, 2008.) Return to text.
26. Hahn, K. L. 2008. "Talk about Talking about New Models of Scholarly Communication," Journal of Electronic Publishing, 11.1, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0011.108. (Accessed September 20, 2008.) Return to text.
27. What Michael Jensen of the National Academies Press describes as "Authority 3.0" in Jensen, M. 2007. "The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority," The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 15, 2007. http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i41/41b00601.htm. (Accessed September 20, 2008.) Return to text.
28. Ober, J., Scheidel, W., Shaw, B. D., and D. Sanclemente. 2007. "Toward Open Access in Ancient Studies: The Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics," Hesperia 76.1, pp. 229-242 http://dx.doi.org/ 10.2972/hesp.76.1.229. (Accessed September 20, 2008.) Return to text.
29. http://publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com/2008/08/working-papers.html. (Accessed September 20, 2008.) Return to text.
30. Campbell, R. and Wates, E. 2007. "Author's Version vs. Publisher's Version: An Analysis of the Copy-Editing Function," Learned Publishing 20, pp. 121-129, http://dx.doi.org/10.1087/174148507X185090. (Accessed September 20, 2008.) (also freely available at: http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/WatesandCampbellpublishedversion.pdf; [Accessed September 20, 2008.]) Thatcher, S. 2008. "The Value Added by Copyediting," Against the Grain 20.4, September 2008; Wright, M. and J. S. Armstrong, 2008. "The Ombudsman: Verification of Citations: Fawlty Towers of Knowledge," Interfaces 38.2, pp. 125-139, http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/inte.1070.0317. (Accessed September 20, 2008.) Return to text.
31. The Mellon Foundation All Projects Archaeology Meeting in March 2008 presented the opportunity for a number of projects funded by Mellon to present their work and get feedback from peers (http://msc.mellon.org/Meetings/archaeology [Accessed September 20, 2008.]). The common issues across presenting archaeological data from the Old and New Worlds were striking. Return to text.
32. This study also revealed interesting facts about the attitudes of tenure committees to electronic scholarship: "Although at least two of the Gutenberg-e authors have been awarded tenure to date, only 12 of the 22 authors whose prize-winning works have been electronically published are now in tenure-track-positions." Waters, D. J, and J. S. Meisel. 2008. "Scholarly Publishing Initiatives" The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation 2007 Annual Report. http://www.mellon.org/news_publications/annual-reports-essays/presidents-essays/scholarly-publishing-initiatives/. (Accessed September 20, 2008.) Return to text.
33. As demonstrated by the Çatalhöyük project ( http://www.catalhoyuk.com/.) (Accessed September 20, 2008.) Return to text.
34. The development of new trust metrics in digital scholarly communication is being explored particularly interestingly by Geoffrey Bilder. Return to text.
35. Pope, B. K. and P. K. Kannan. 2003. An Evaluation Study of the National Academies Press's E-Publishing Initiatives, Washington, D.C. p. 7. http://aaupnet.org/resources/mellon/nap/final_public.pdf. (Accessed September 20, 2008.) In terms of free content from ASCSA Publications, 95 books are available free of charge through the internet via the Google Book Search program. Inspired by the NAP initiative, we have also chosen to make these 100% viewable. It is too early to see the impact of this yet, but the traffic is impressive. In 2007, for example, there were 41,186 "book visits" to ASCSA books in the program (a book visit is recorded, according to Google, "each time a unique user views your book"). 399 (or around 1%) of these visits led a visitor to click a link to "buy the book." Out of copyright ASCSA titles are also continuously being added through the Google Library digitization program, as participating libraries stumble on pre-1923 ASCSA publications. Agora Picture Books, the series of small, in recent years also colorful, booklets on ancient life as revealed through excavations since 1931 at the Athenian Agora are available as free downloadable PDFs from http://www.agathe.gr. (Accessed September 20, 2008.) Return to text.
36. 65,137 full-text, online articles from archaeology titles (27 journals); 16,229 articles from architecture and architectural history titles (22 journals); 118,760 articles from art and art history titles (76 journals); and 104,614 articles from classical studies titles. These figures come from online statistics made available to JSTOR's participating publishers. The categorization of journals into the different subject areas is done by JSTOR's own librarians. Return to text.
37. The cost to purchase a Hesperia article from JSTOR is $12. Sebastian Heath surveyed a number of other journals in archaeology and classical studies in April 2008, and his analysis suggests that non-profit publishers are pricing their article sales at comparative levels: http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2008/04/per-article-charges.html. (Accessed September 20, 2008.) According to Michael Jensen from the National Academies Press, $10 to $15 is a "sweet spot" for a PDF purchase. Return to text.
38. Gray or grey literature "is commonly defined as any documentary material that is not commercially published and is typically composed of technical reports, working papers, business documents, and conference proceedings. The greatest challenges involved with these items are the process of identification, since there is limited indexing, and acquisition, since availability is usually marred with uncertainty. Added to this is the absence of editorial control, raising questions about authenticity and reliability. Yet despite these considerations, gray literature is continually referenced in scholarly articles and dissertations and therefore remains an issue that academic librarians must contend with." Mathews, B. S. 2004. "Gray Literature: Resources for Locating Unpublished Research," College and Research Library News 65.3. http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/crlnews/backissues2004/march04/graylit.cfm. (Accessed September 20, 2008.) Return to text.
39. Bradley, R. A. 2006. "Bridging the Two Cultures: Commercial Archaeology and the Study of Prehistoric Britain," The Antiquaries Journal 86, pp. 1-13. Return to text.
40. For example, see the online supplement to the Brecoulaki, H., Stocker, S., and Davis, J. L. 2008. "The Archer Fragment from the Palace of Pylos," to be published and available online in October, 2008, as part of Hesperia 77.3. http://dx.doi.org/10.2972/hesp.77.3.394. Return to text.
41. A recent study of six top-cited scientific journals suggest that online supplements became unavailable to readers within 5 years of publication in the case of almost 10% of the articles submitted with online supplementary material: Evangelou, E., Trikalinos, T. A., and J. P. A. Ioannidis. 2005. "Unavailability of Online Supplementary Scientific Information from Articles Published in Major Journals," The FASEB Journal 19, pp. 1943-1944. Information from Portico; pers. comm. Evan Owens, Chief Technology Officer. Return to text.
For other Newsletter articles concerning the use of electronic media in the humanities, consult the Subject index.
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