AlunSalt

Now the thesis is out of the way I need to fix my publication plans. There’s an added twist in the UK. We don’t have tenure here, we have the RAE/REF.
The RAE was the Research Assessment Exercise which was a way of grading the research produced by departments. It was bloated, bureaucratic and expensive and [...]

Rundkvist, M. 2007. Scholarly Journals between the Past and the Future: The Fornvännen Centenary Round-Table Seminar, Stockholmm 21 April 2006. Konferenser 65. Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien.
It’s a measure of the quality of this book that I have delayed putting up a review until I have thought it could get the audience it deserves. [...]

Mickey Mouse Copyright Laws. Based on a photo (cc) Liber.
One of the advantages of being slow in writing is that you can look at what everyone else is saying about something. Often people will have thought about the same problem and already anticipated problems in your own line of thought, so you can avoid making [...]

Pictish Stone. Photo (cc) Pamela Adam. Click on the photo to read her comments.
Good news from the Society for Medieval Archaeology and the wizards at the Archaeology Data Service. The first fifty (50) issues of Medieval Archaeology are available for free online. Its not quite open access, because the issues can’t be archived elsewhere, but [...]

Work is going well, you may see some of it before Christmas. I have plans for the New Year and I may have one or two archaeology projects that you can take part in wherever you are – if I can work out exactly what it is I’m doing. In the meantime there’s news of [...]

Capitol Hill. Photo (cc) Wyntuition.
If you live in the USA then Bora Zivkovic needs your help. The Senate is considering the FY08 Labor-HHS Bill. It’s of interest because it includes provisions to make NIH funded research available through open access 12 months after commercial publication. Currently the voluntary arrangement means that only 5% of research [...]

Reading Archaeology. Photo (cc) Queen Roly.
There’s an interesting post gone up at Publishing Archaeology: Why Aren’t There More Good Book Reviews in Archaeology? – the discipline, not the magazine. Mike Smith raises one of those points which is obvious when someone else mentions it. Why is there no archaeological equivalent of BMCR?
One key point is [...]

The Popping Cork. Photo (cc) Davepilsbrow.
Here’s a story which has been noted elsewhere quite a while ago. I saw it mentioned at About Archaeology a couple of weeks ago, but I’ll mention it anyway as it’s also very exciting. Internet Archaeology is moving towards an Open Access model.
If you’ve not seen it Internet Archaeology is [...]

I’m going through a busy patch at the moment, which means I don’t have time to comment on some posts which I’ve seen. What there’ll be for the next couple of weeks will be posts from del.icio.us and the occasional bulk post like this one because I’m still reading, and many other blogs are going [...]

I’ll be talking at the Classical Association conference at Birmingham in a few weeks. I was told there’d be a session on publishing, so I get to be Bora for a day.

The plan is to talk about Peer-to-peer publishing and the creative process. The other speakers seem to be talking about publishing finished work. There’s [...]