Archiving, Abstracting, and Tenure Concerns
(About.com)How is IA archived and abstracted?(Judith Winters) At a daily/weekly level, everything is maintained, backed up by York Computing services, but we are in this for the long term, and have made arrangements with our 'sister' project (we share an office!) the Archaeology Data Service http://ads.ahds.ac.uk to archive our contents.
The ADS's remit is the long-term preservation of digital research materials, and we have taken all reasonable steps to make sure that our content will be as durable as a hard copy volume. This is not to underestimate the problem. Migration of on-line content offers the best solution but who can predict what browser-dependent plug-ins will still be available in 10 or 100 years time to play some of our multimedia features?
Nonetheless these are widespread concerns not limited to archaeology and increasing activity at the level of major national institutions, such as the British Library and National Preservation Office, gives us increasing confidence. Ironically it is the CD-ROMs, often regarded as preservation formats in themselves, that will probably have the shortest life-span.
What about acceptance of online publication for tenure committees? Have you seen a change in attitudes, and can you characterize this change?
An early objective and indeed challenge for the journal was encouraging culture change - trying to alter the perception of the Internet being a dumping ground and that reputable archaeologists did not publish there. Although we have always insisted that articles are peer-reviewed, and reject a high proportion of the proposals submitted to us, worries were expressed by many that e-publication would not count towards promotion and tenure. In the UK, research publication is geared towards the five-yearly Research Assessment Exercise, or RAE, according to which every academic receives a score from 1 to 5 according to the quality of their best 4 publications in the previous 5 years. These scores are of great importance in determining funding awarded to institutions. We have been extremely fortunate that the review panels for both Archaeology and for Classics have been keen to encourage electronic publication and have left contributors in no doubt that their work would count in the RAE, irrespective of the publication medium.
See: http://intarch.ac.uk/ for more information about the Research Assessment Exercise. We would hope that this is of import to authors and research committees from outside the UK too.
