Places to Publish Open-Access in Classics and Related Areas

The following was begun during an informal morning coffee with a group of Hellenic Studies librarians. Special thanks go to Elli Mylonas and Colin McCaffrey, who were seated on either side of me, but others contributed, and of course I am responsible for any errors in what follows. If there are omissions, please comment or email me at phoebe.acheson at gmail.com so I can add to the lists that follow!

Need a Refresher on What Open Access Is?

• I posted a basic introduction for Classicists during Open Access Week a few years ago.
• See also The Association of Research Libraries’ SPARC Resources for Open Access Education.

Fairly Traditional Monographs

The following are publishing monographs and making digital access of some kind available for free to all; in many cases print books may also be purchased and/or printed on demand.

• California Classical Studies
• Center for Hellenic Studies Online Publications
• Dickinson College Commentaries (commentaries, natch.)
• Open Book Publishers (current titles in Classics are described as textbooks)
• Oriental Institute Publications
• University of Michigan Open Humanities Press

Journal Articles

• Directory of Open Access Journals This site allows browsing for open-access titles that use peer review by discipline (look under Arts and Architecture, Languages and Literatures, History and Archaeology, or other headings depending on your subfield).
• Ancient World Online: List of Open-Access Journals in Ancient Studies This list is extremely comprehensive and includes many items not in the DOAJ, above, but many are not peer-reviewed and others are titles that have put back issues online open-access but are not publishing current issues in that format. With these caveats, a journal on this list might be the right one for your publishing needs.
• ISAW Papers I am highlighting this specific project (title? series?) because it is at the forefront of technology for publishing born-digital articles (highly linked, linked open data friendly, etc.)

Pre-Prints, Working Papers, and Self-Archiving

In many fields, pre-prints or “working” versions of papers that have not yet been formally published are routinely circulated and deposited online in open access repositories. This is not yet common in Classics, but certainly could become more so.

• Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics This resource currently only serves members of the academic communities at these two institutions.
• Bill Caraher’s Pre-Prints at Scribd Bill Caraher is extremely consistent about making pre-prints of his chapters, articles and conference papers available to the public, hosted at Scribd (a free service) and linked from (and often discussed in some detail at) his Archaeology of the Mediterranean World. Any scholar could follow this model.

Self-Archiving is the process of  making ones own published work available open-access online. It can be done in a variety of ways and places:

• An Institutional Repository (sometimes called a Digital Library or Repository; example: DukeSpace) at your institution (ask your liaison librarian!)
• Scribd as above
• Academia.edu (which now requires readers to have a free account to access your papers)
• Your own personal or departmental web site or blog
• In archaeology, Propylaeum-DOK from the University of Heidelberg Library is a subject-specific repository accepting papers from scholars all over the world.

The big issue with self-archiving is making sure you have the right to do so under the contract you signed with the original publisher of your work.  These contracts can be negotiated.  Here’s an account by librarian Micah Vandegrift detailing his recent negotiation about self-archiving. If your library has a Scholarly Communications office (example: Duke Scholarly Communications), they may also be able to give you advice on this process.

I welcome your comments with further thoughts about specific venues to publish open-access or other ways in which to freely disseminate scholarly information online.