[open-archaeology] Journal of Open Archaeology Data

[Stefano Costa]

Il 16/12/2013 18:02, Samuel Moore ha scritto:
> Hi all,
> 
> I wanted to let you know that the Journal of Open Archaeology Data
> currently seeks peer-reviewers, editorial board members and authors
> for the coming year. Please do get in touch if you'd like to get
> involved! You can visit the site here:
> http://openarchaeologydata.metajnl.com/
> 
> The journal features peer-reviewed data papers describing archaeology
> datasets with high reuse potential. A data paper is a publication
> that is designed to make other researchers aware of open data that is
> of potential use to them. As such, it describes the methods used to
> create the dataset, its structure, its reuse potential, and a link to
> its location in a repository. It is important to note that a data
> paper does not replace a research article, but rather complements and
> links to it.
> 
> I'd be especially keen to hear how the list feels we could be better
> serving the community and attracting/encouraging archaeologists
> outside the open data community too. I'd also be interested to hear
> whether there are any important repositories missing from our list:
> http://openarchaeologydata.metajnl.com/about/editorialPolicies#custom-0

Sam,
thanks for your email.

With my coordinator hat on: we would appreciate a lot if JOAD was more
visible on this mailing list (e.g. submit a notice when a new data paper
is out), that has been missing until now. I can imagine that in most
cases, people who contribute to the working group are willing to share
their comments and constructive criticism about published papers (in a
kind of post-print open peer review), either here or on the JOAD website.

With my JOAD editorial advisory board member hat: I see lot of potential
for JOAD, especially now that Internet Archaeology has started
publishing data papers - IMHO that is not competition but proliferation
and it will bring benefits (btw their approach to peer review is very
promising and brings fresh air into papers that area always potentially
boring - data is boring on its own). A few months ago I sent a few
emails to make sure that the MAPPA Open Data archive was listed among
the repositories, and that happened. At the moment I am advocating data
papers among colleagues in Italy, and I encourage other members to do
the same. That is not an easy task and there is still a lot of
resistance. Counterintuitively young researchers are more cautious than
their older professors, advisors or bosses: showing real, beautiful
things that can be done with open data is something we still don't do as
much as needed. Other specific initiatives to encourage JOAD as a
publishing venue could be e.g. to offer winners of the CAA Recycle Award
a reduced publication fee (in some cases this would require the data
under study to become open in the first place).

Finally, leaving away all the previous hats [0] the area that seems
weaker at this moment is, as you also noted, attracting archaeologists
outside the open data community. One thing we should do is to actively
inform those sub-disciplinary communities that could be interested by a
specific open data (paper) and try to engage in a constructive debate
that is focused on the advantages for that specific field of studies and
not on the general, theoretical good stemming from open data. Personally
I am increasingly annoyed with "normal" papers where more than half of
the content is a lengthy, biased selection of data bits from a study and
discussion and conclusions are a few paragraphs - not much for the extra
reading but because I have to do stuff like georeferencing and tracing
maps, manually copying tables to a spreadsheet from a PDF, etc. That I
want and need to reuse data is only normal, either because I'm trying to
visualise information in its wider disciplinary context, statistically
comparing to my own data, or making a fortune by reselling hardcover
editions of crappy papers in Comic Sans.

I hope others will add more insightful comments, and while we're at it,
on the shortest day of the year in the Northern emisphere, best wishes
to all

-steko

[0] mandatory reference is to the history of archaeology as seen through
headgear, visible at
http://archaeologists-in-the-media.blogspot.it/2011/03/chapter-4-what-are-they-wearing.html