[open-archaeology] Journal of Open Archaeology Data

Tue Jan 7 17:01:27 UTC 2014

Hi Stefano, (and the list),

I was hoping to pick up the conversation we had below to fully explore some of these ideas about how the journal could interact with the list. 

Firstly, I will ensure that the journal is more active on the list (posting articles, highlighting conference presence, etc.) and I'd equally love to receive feedback for how we could be improving things, and especially how we can open up more data! I agree that Internet Archaeology's uptake of the data paper format is a positive step and things look to be moving in the right direction. I completely agree with Stefano that we should be reaching out to individual sub-disciplines and showing them the direct benefits of sharing data - especially where we can highlight particular success stories.

Another thing we at JOAD are working on, which is almost complete, is a new web-based article template for the journal. This will be a super quick way of submitting a data paper to the journal and will offer authors an instant html preview of how the article will look when published (which should illustrate to potential authors just how easy it is to write and submit a data paper). I wanted to see if anyone is interested in beta testing this for us? Note: this would mean that you would have to submit an actual data paper, which would be peer-reviewed and eventually published, but you would be the first authors to test the tool before we roll it out to all of our data journals. It would be great to hear from anyone interested in testing this, so please do get in touch! 

All the best,

Sam

--
Samuel Moore
Managing Editor, Ubiquity Press,
Panton Fellow in Open Data, Open Knowledge Foundation,
PhD Student, Dept. Digital Humanities, King's College London

http://openarchaeologydata.metajnl.com/
www.twitter.com/samoore_

On 20 Dec 2013, at 20:11, Stefano Costa <steko at iosa.it> wrote:

> 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
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