Internet Archaeology is pleased to announce that it has become a fully open access journal.
From this month Internet Archaeology’s 130 institutional subscribers from the UK, USA, Australia and Europe will no longer have to pay the £160 a year subscription and the £7 charge for individual articles is also being scrapped, making Internet Archaeology one of the first journals to transition from a subscription model to full open access. Several things have spurred this decision.
Funded through JISC’s eLib programme, Internet Archaeology was launched in
1995 as a born-digital journal and published its first issue in 1996. It
was also open access before the term was really invented. It was only in 2000 as part of the initial funding agreement, and as the only sustainable option for us at
that time, that institutional subscriptions were introduced, followed by
subscriptions for individuals in 2001.
Internet Archaeology has tried to be more than ‘just a journal’. It has always explored the possibilities of the web and has delved into many different publication formats. This flexibility extends into everything we do. Being a small operation, Internet Archaeology has been quick to respond to the rapid changes occurring in the wider scholarly landscape over the last few years, and demonstrates that independent journals can play a role in this brave new world.
Over the last 4 years, parallel to the development of the Open Access movement, we have made active efforts in this direction, by switching to a default CC-BY license, by opening up our back issues with an annual rolling wall, and by adjusting our subscription charges accordingly. By the start of 2014, over 50 per cent of the articles we had published were open access. Parallel to this, we have also been receiving a rising level of author-funded submissions so we felt that this was the right time to complete the move and focus efforts fully on developing our open access model.
Mike Heyworth, director of the Council for British Archaeology, which publishes the journal, has commented:
“We are delighted that Internet Archaeology is now in a position to make a sustainable move to Open Access, which is fully in line with our aim of Archaeology for All. The e-journal continues to lead the way and we are very encouraged with the growing range of content and the widening readership.”
There will always be challenges of course but we are very excited to be taking the journal into this new phase.
See the Press Releases by the University of York and the Department of Archaeology.
