[open-archaeology] Immediate open access publications of CAA proceedings?

Wed May 9 12:28:50 UTC 2012

Scrive Benjamin Ducke <benducke at fastmail.fm>:

> While the CAA remains the most important forum
> for new research and developments in computational
> archaeology, the mode of publication has unfortunately
> not changed with the times as much as it should have.
> Most of the research presented at CAA conferences has
> a "scientific half life time" of 6 months or so, but
> proceedings take 2-4 years for publication on average.

Hi Ben,
last year's (2011) proceedings have already been published a few months ago:
http://dare.uva.nl/aup/nl/record/412958 and presented at Southampton.

> This means that current research is not available for
> proper academic citation and will be outdated by the
> time it is. There have been plans to change this for
> years now, but no solution has surfaced yet.
>
> I have been frustrated by this countless times
> in the past, and I imagine that I am not the
> only one who is dissatisfied with the current
> situation: Who needs costly, slow, printed
> conference proceedings in this day and age?
>
> I believe the way to go is this:
>
>    http://www.stadtarchaeologie.at/?page_id=1678
>
> ... if they can do it, why can't CAA?

I don't think the long times have to do with the printing, but mostly with peer
review and editing (digital publishing needs that, too). Peer review can be
very time consuming (I can tell being a reviewer for CAA myself).

> The question is: what to do in order to speed up
> the necessary policy changes? How about addressing
> a petition to the permanent CAA organizing committe?
>
> Anyone here in the know what's going on behind the
> scenes, at the CAA steering committee, regarding this
> topic?

The best thing is to ask the CAA steering committee. There is since 2010 a
publication officer (Philip Verhagen, based at VU University in Amsterdam). And
to be honest, I don't see how this list is an appropriate place to ask for what
is happening "behind the scenes" of CAA.

Cheers,
steko

--
Stefano Costa

Coordinator, Working Group on Open Data in Archaeology
http://wiki.okfn.org/wg/archaeology
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://www.okfn.org · http://opendefinition.org/