Another New Open Access Archaeology journal

In sharp contrast to the journal I discussed in the previous post, the new journal Open Archaeology is published by the ancient and venerable house of De Gruyter. It is an annual, but as it appears to be exclusively online (and Open Access), I'm not sure why. Storage is so cheap that one could post a large number of contributions throughout the year and/or divvy them up into multiple issues. I'm not sure I understand the advantage of calling it an annual, creating deadlines, and putting out one issue per year. But then I've never edited a journal.

They appear to have published but one issue so far, for 2014, and it has but two articles in it. They are evidently planning a new issue, probably for the coming year, on "challenging digital archaeology," which is certainly a provocative topic.

I've often wondered whether an open access model would work in archaeology. There is certainly plenty of demand for more publication venues--we don't typically have space to publish everything that we would like--hence the enormous gray literature. But I doubt that open access is a useful solution for archaeologists because we don't have money to pay the page charges. If cultural resources management companies pressed their clients to pay for page charges, that could provide an important outlet for disseminating their plentiful research.