Towards Open Access in Ancient Studies
Ober, Josiah, Scheidel, Walter, Shaw, Brent D. and Sanclemente, Donna
Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, February 2007
Abstract
An investigation of the present impact and future prospects of open access electronic publication of scholarly research on working papers sites, based on the authors’ collective experience with developing and maintaining a WP site for Classics and Classical Archaeology.
The authors’ experience with founding and managing an open access internet site for publishing scholarly preprints provokes a number of questions (and a few answers) about the present and future status of publication in classical studies. Open access e-prints offer unique advantages to readers in terms of availability and to authors in terms of time-dated registration of their work. Yet they raise difficult questions about certification and archiving of scholarship. Internet eprints and traditional forms of publication are currently complementary; the emergence of internet-based e-print sites is unlikely to render traditional publication venues redundant, at least in the near term. Yet both the world of scholarly publication and academic evaluation of scholarship are changing in important ways; closer cooperation between publishers, scholars, and university administrators could help to maximize the benefits and limit the costs to disciplines, institutions, and individuals.
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