ArcheoFOSS 2022
On the road to open access: Insights from French antiquity journals and databases

Panel: Electronic Publishing and Open Science in Archaeology

This paper proposes an overview of practices ensuring the gradual transition of printed archaeological journals, already internationalized, to new models of online scientific publishing. It also examines the economic and organizational means that guarantee the sustainability of these models.

The editorial unit of the Maison des Sciences de l’Hommes Mondes in Nanterre gathers staff in charge of the editorial production of several archaeological journals of various ages, from the Revue archéologique created in 1844 to the electronic journal Americae founded in 2016. These journals are all digitally released and committed towards Open Access, to varying degrees and according to different models. The research team Archéologie du monde grec et systèmes d’information of ArScAn has developed digital resources answering the needs of French and international researchers, such as the « Bibliographie de l’architecture grecque » and « Bibliographie des verres gréco-romains », which were originally linked to Revue archéologique, and the database EMA of children burials in Antiquity, a research tool fed by thirty European contributors, which needs to be sustained after the end of the funded programme (Agence nationale de la recherche, 2012-2015).

Both parties, in a collaborative approach, regularly exchange on the convergence of their practices in the fields of print and digital publishing, interactive media, and the articulation between publications and data, within the framework of research on the digital humanities.

We will analyze some examples of online journals and companion websites produced by our teams, from their scientific development within the field of archaeology and the sciences of antiquity to their digital design. We will present the storage, publication and accessibility, preservation and exploitation features and modalities of these resources, built in partnership with different digital infrastructures, mainly French, in a context of progressively enlarged open access, in which the diamond access model attracts the most attention today.