Print v Online Publishing
(About.com) Do you have any feel for the main difference between IA and print journals?(Judith Winters) Conventional paper publication cannot do justice to the rich diversity of archaeological information, so electronic publication, by contrast, offers opportunities to overcome these difficulties and present archaeology in ways that cannot be done in print but also in ways that might actually aid and assist in research.
Alongside text, articles can incorporate unlimited colour images (which are so costly to reproduce on paper). But more than this, we are able to publish large searchable data sets online (allowing the intermeshing of data, interpretation and discussion) as well as visualisations e.g. in VRML and QTVR. On top of this, the instantaneous World-Wide distribution is a big appeal to authors. E-publication and hypertext allows text to be structured in many ways and levels e.g. given a hierarchy to allow readers to choose the level of detail they find appropriate. The other main difference is the rapidity of publication compared to print. Some articles in IA have taken less than 5 weeks to be submitted, refereed, edited and published.
Archaeologists are already using digital data everyday in our work—IA can offer the place to publish our already digital data instead of falling back into the comfortable but inflexible old armchair that is world of print - bad metaphor, but you know what I mean I hope?!!
How are you funded right now? Are there any plans to change it?
Since 1996, access to Internet Archaeology has been free to anyone with an Internet connection, with running costs being borne by the eLib programme. However, this revenue source finally runs out without chance of renewal in 2001, and we have decided to start charging for institutional access as one means of raising revenue. At the moment this *only* affects UK higher education institutions but we will be implementing this elsewhere in due course—given that almost two thirds of our readers are accessing the journal from outside UK HE, then this is an obvious next step. [The UK HE readers are identified by the "ac.uk" designation at the end of their email addresses.]
If you're curious as to why we started with ac.uk, then in short, it is because in effect we are means-testing access to the journal, and charging those who we believe can afford to pay. At first sight this might seem a rather bizarre approach, but if so we are certainly not alone in adopting it, as it is also a model adopted by a sister eLib-funded publication, Sociological Research Online. It does have a certain logic in that so far we have received funding from the UK HE sector, and now that the grant is running out, we are simply passing on the cost to the UK HE institutions who have used us the most.
Our long term business plan envisages three sources of income, none of which will be sufficient to support our full running costs on its own - as well as subscriptions, we hope also to look to publication subventions (we have already received a few and anticipate this to grow) and advertising revenue (although as an academic site our use of the academic network means that we are subject to certain rules. But we feel that at the minute such revenue (given the fairly narrow field of likely advertisers) is unlikely to pay for my salary on its own.
