VEiL and the Open Access (OA) agenda: discussion at CAA2017

MC fellow Arianna Traviglia has co-chaired together with Xavier Rodier (University of Tours) the session: Open Open Open. The Rise of Open Scientific Publishing and the Archaeological Discipline: Managing the Paradigm Shift during  the CAA2017 Atlanta Conference Digital archaeologies, material worlds (past and present) held in Atlanta (GA, USA) from 14 to 16 March 2017.

Held in conjunction with the official launch in Atlanta of the Open Access Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology (JCAA), of which Dr Traviglia is joint Editor, this session was intended to be a showcase and forum for theory, initiatives, experiences, proposals and projects related to the broader theme of Open Publishing in Archaeology, with the ultimate goal of using the discussion of the CAA community to help forge the future directions of the Journal. The session focused on the transformations happening in the domain of archaeological publication and on the struggling of the discipline to cope with the new challenges brought forth by the new publication paradigm. During the session it was highlighted how, although the archaeological discipline produces, for example, datasets with high reuse potential that are ideal for Open Content initiatives, its scholars are still pressed to publish peer reviewed articles in accordance to the standard academic practices, as national-level evaluation procedures for the assessment of University research quality have not yet fully incorporated measures of impact such as altmetrics, bibliometrics, semantics and webmetrics (‘Open metrics’).
Within the dominant discourse, the model that appeared to many most suitable for the archaeological scholarship was one that publishes journal articles linked to open access datasets: this covers a spectrum of possibilities ranging from short, scholarly publications describing on-line accessible datasets to full papers that integrate datasets deposited in repositories (either as part of the journal or externally maintained). These models, however, as highlighted during the session, have varied acceptance. Despite their potentiality, for example, data papers growing popularity in other disciplines still does not seem to be reflected in the archaeological practise, where they do not receive appropriate recognition as they are not considered to meet the standards of ‘traditional’ scientific publishing.
As a project that subscribed the H2020 Open data Pilot, data and publication produced by VEiL will be mainly available in Open format to allow for sharable and reproducible scientific research. This session therefore has been pivotal in defining publication strategies within the project.