Friday, September 25, 2009

Ancient and Near Eastern journals open access at revues.org

[Originally posted 5/5/09, updated 5/6/09 with the addition of Atlas du Liban. Updated 9/25/09 with the addition of Annuaire de l’École pratique des hautes études. Section des sciences historiques et philologiques and Annuaire de l’École pratique des hautes études. Section des sciences religieuses.. Updated 12/7/09; updated 2/9/10]

Revues.org has an interesting suite of open access online journals relating to antiquity and the Near East. Current holdings include the following journals:

Abstracta Iranica
Annuaire de l’École pratique des hautes études. Section des sciences historiques et philologiques
Annuaire de l’École pratique des hautes études. Section des sciences religieuses
Le Bulletin d’études orientales
Bulletin du Centre de recherche français à Jérusalem
Cahiers d’Asie centrale
Cahiers d’études sur la Méditerranée orientale et le monde turco-iranien
Cahiers «Mondes Anciens»
Chroniques yéménites
Documents d’archéologie méridionale
Égypte/Monde arabe
European journal of Turkish studies
Paléo. Revue d'archéologie préhistorique
Préhistoires méditerranéennes
Quaternaire: Revue de l'Association française pour l'étude du Quaternaire
Revue archéologique de l’Est
Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée
Revue archéologique du centre de la France

[And see the full List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies]

and these monographs from the Collections électroniques de l’Ifpo

Liban, espaces partagés et pratiques de rencontre [Texte intégral]
Sous la direction de Franck MermierL’ouvrage inaugure la nouvelle collection de l’Institut, Les Cahiers de l’Ifpo. Cette première édition des Cahiers de l’IFPO est consacrée aux espaces partagés et pratiques de rencontre au Liban, sans que prédomine, à nos yeux, dans les notions de partage et de rencontre, le caractère positif ou neutre de l’un, la valeur de mise...

Atlas du Liban [Texte intégral]
Sous la direction de Éric Verdeil, Ghaleb Faour et Sébastien Velut Offrir une vision nouvelle du territoire libanais et mettre en évidence ses transformations depuis une trentaine d’années : tel est le projet de cet atlas, produit d’une collaboration franco-libanaise. L’ouvrage repose sur une large collecte d’informations spatialisées à une échelle fine ; sa cartographie riche et inédite permet...

ONG palestiniennes et construction étatique [Texte intégral]
de Caroline Abu-Sada
Avec la reconfiguration territoriale et la mise en place de l’Autorité palestinienne qui ont suivi les accords d’Oslo, puis les bouleversements liés à la seconde Intifada, les orientations et les priorités des ONG palestiniennes ont évidemment évolué, notamment pour celles qui ont un lien avec l’enjeu du « retour à la terre ».

Penser l'Orient [Texte intégral]
Sous la direction de Youssef Courbage et Manfred Kropp
Les entretiens franco-allemands de Beyrouth.
Nul n'ignore le rôle occulte ou déclaré de ces maîtres à penser que sont devenus les orientalistes occidentaux. Nul n'ignore les implications, louables ou critiquables, de leurs recherches dans la perception du monde arabe et musulman et, chemin faisant, dans la conception des politiques de leurs...
Armées et combats en Syrie de 491/1098 à 569/1174 [Texte intégral]
de Abbès Zouache
Dès leur arrivée en Syrie, les Francs firent preuve d’une adaptabilité multiforme. Ils intégrèrent des éléments locaux dans leurs armées, palliant ainsi leurs difficultés démographiques, même s’il faut revenir sur l’idée d’une supériorité musulmane systématique. Les armées musulmanes souffrirent longtemps d’un déficit...

Each component of revues.org includes news feeds allowing readers to be alerted when new content appears.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

"Preprints and Open Access Revisited"

The following article appeared in APA Newsletter, volume 32, Number 3 (June 2009), and is reformatted here, with the permission of the author, in html with added hyperlinks.


LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT
Preprints and Open Access Revisited

This is a revised reprint (rather than a preprint!) of my February 2009 President’s Letter. Many in the APA membership seem to have missed the February Newsletter, due to the change-over to electronic distribution. Since I regard the issue of preprints and open access to be of great importance to the future of the organization, I offer it again. My apologies to those who read this Letter last winter. To those missed it the first time around, I hereby reiterate my previous invitation to the members of the APA to make their scholarly work-in-progress public as preprints on the newly formed Classical Research Network (CRN). Instructions about how to find and submit papers on the CRN will be found below. But first I will try to answer the obvious question: “Why should classicists bother with preprints?” Preprints are not peer reviewed publications. But they can be an important stage on the way to peer-reviewed publication and there is considerable value in making one’s scholarship public in advance of final publication.

Scholarship is, of course, all about making the results of research available to a community of scholars. In the first 120 years after the foundation of APA (in 1869) classical scholarship was made public primarily in the form of printed books and periodicals: peer-reviewed journals, monographs, and in occasional collections of essays and Festschriften. But the situation changed with the coming of the internet. Bryn Mawr Classical Review, which proudly claims the title of the second-oldest online journal in the humanities, began publishing online in 1990. Since then, the quantity of scholarship available online has exploded: e-journals; back issues of hard-copy journals on JSTOR and other archive sites; e-books from ebrary and Amazon.com; online bibliographies (notably APh and DCB); web pages (of organizations, academic departments, and individuals); blogs and more offer the potential for making research publicly available.

The “preprint” or “working papers” series seems to me to offer a promising, and still under-utilized venue for making classical scholarship public. Unlike many forms of internet publication, the preprint series is a time-tested form of scholarly communication. Working papers have long been a standard feature of how scholarly work is carried out in academic departments of social and natural sciences–indeed, some preprint series date back to before the internet era. The popularity of the form is due to several unique advantages that it offers to scholars: Preprints reduce to near-zero the time lag between the completion of an article that is “ready to circulate,” even if not yet “ready to publish,” and its appearance in public. Authors can gain feedback on a paper before it is submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. The chronological priority of a new idea is established once a paper is “datestamped” by appearing in a series. And, not least, readers (including people lacking access to research libraries) gain access to up-to-date academic scholarship.

Despite these advantages, the humanities were slow to follow the lead of the social and natural sciences. It was not until 2005 that the Classics Departments of Princeton and Stanford Universities launched their experimental preprint series, The Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics (http://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc). The series is open access–anyone with an internet connection and a reasonably up-to-date browser can access all site content and download papers without charge. Copyright for each paper is held by the author(s); there is no editorial content review (once again: preprints are not peer-reviewed publications). Posting is limited to the faculty and students of the hosting institutions.

The PSWPC experiment seems to have been successful, at least if success is measured in terms of authors (currently ca. 40 faculty and graduate students), papers (ca. 150–if one counts re-editions), and readers (or at least viewers and downloaders). Our experience in the first year of the series, along with some preliminary readership statistics, are in reported in J. Ober, W. Scheidel, B. Shaw, and D. Sanclemente, “Toward Open Access in Ancient Studies. The Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics,” Hesperia 76 (2007): 229-42 (http://dx.doi.org/10.2972/hesp.76.1.229 - open access). The series was reviewed in March 2008 by David Pritchard in Literary and Linguistic Computing (http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/fqn005v1 - ironically, only the abstract of this review-article is open access) [the texts of this article is available at http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/2226 -CJ-]

When we launched the PSWPC site, we hoped that other Classics Departments would set up their own parallel series. The University of Wales Lampeter has indeed done so (http://www.lamp.ac.uk/ric/working_papers.html), but there are non-trivial costs involved with setting up and maintaining a departmental preprint site.

Happily, thanks to the hard work of a team of scholars at the University of Texas (notably Lesley Dean-Jones in the Classics Department and Bernard Black in the Law School) there is now an open access and very well organized Classics preprint series available to all Classicists: the Classics Research Network (http://www.ssrn.com/crn/index.html). The CRN is part of the Humanities Research Network, which is in turn a part of the large and well established Social Science Research Network (the SSRN currently includes over 200,000 papers and gets ca. 7 million downloads per year).

The Classics Research Network is open access: papers posted on the site are uploaded by authors without charge and searched, browsed, and downloaded by readers without charge. Authors retain the copyright and retain the right to post their work on other sites.

To browse the existing papers on the Classic Research Network:
  • Enter into your browser: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/displayjournalbrowse.cfm, which will bring up a list of Networks. Find, at the bottom of the list, “Humanities Research Network.”
  • Click the square box in front of Humanities Research Network, which will bring up a list of Humanities Networks. You will find, at the top of the list, “HRN Classical Research Network.” Click the title to see a list of all the papers on the CRN, or the box in front of the title to browse specific CRN Subject Matter eJournals (e.g. History, Literature, Classical Tradition). [or go directly to HRN Classical Research Network]
To register to submit a paper on the Classics Research Network, go to www.ssrn.com and click on “submit.” The procedure for submitting papers to the CRN is quite straight forward and works quickly as soon as you complete registration. By registering, you will set up an individual “author page,” which will include direct links to all your posted papers. For example, my own page is http://ssrn.com/author= 336081. As you become more familiar with the network you will find that its utility grows. You may choose to receive e-mail notification when other scholars post papers in research areas of interest to you. You may submit both preprints (Working Paper Series) and, if you have not given away electronic rights, previously published papers (Accepted Papers Series). After you submit a paper, you may revise it as often as you wish.

I realize that for some classicists posting preprints on an open access web site will initially seem strange, perhaps even dangerous. I believe the risks are minimal and that they are, in any event, much outweighed by the risks associated with failing to make our scholarship public in a timely way. The highly experienced SSRN administrators, who handle tens of thousands of preprints annually, report that publishers ordinarily have no objection to authors having posted their papers with a preprint series. They also report that incidents of posted papers being misappropriated are almost unknown; the few known cases of misappropriation have been addressed swiftly and to the author’s satisfaction. This relative lack of complications for authors is confirmed by my own years of experience with the Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics.

I encourage APA members to submit their papers to the Classical Research Network. My sincere hope is that that the SSRN’s Classics Research Network will soon become a standard place where all those who care about classical studies can freely post their scholarly efforts, and freely obtain access to current research.

Josiah Ober

Friday, September 18, 2009

Onomasticon Oasiticum

Onomasticon Oasiticum: An Onomasticon of Personal Names found in Documentary Texts from the Theban Oasis in Graeco-Roman Times
Compiled by Robert P. Salomons and Klaas A.Worp
Revised version (September 2009; first version July 2007)

In the Avertissement (p.vii) to his well known study Les Oasis d’Égypte (Cairo 1987), and on many pages elsewhere in this volume, the late Guy Wagner alludes to an exhaustive prosopography of the Great Oasis, compiled by himself but unfortunately for financial reasons not incorporated in Les Oasis. However, a separate publication of this prosopography, as announced in the Avertissement, did not appear either. Therefore, the need for such a prosopography remained unfulfilled.

The idea of composing a new onomasticon of the Dakhleh Oasis, or an
Onomasticon Mothiticum as we wish to call it, was born independently during the 5th Dakhleh Oasis Project conference held in Cairo, June 2006, where Worp gave a paper on Christian names in fourth century documents from Kellis. An additional incentive for compiling such an onomasticon was the consideration that Worp himself had already published a substantial number of documentary papyri, ostraka and wooden tablets from this area ( in particular in P.Kellis, vol. I, and in O.Kellis). It was, therefore, only a matter of merging his various indices nominum and adding names of persons from the Dakleh oasis figuring in papyri and ostraka already published elsewhere. This activity involved collecting the relevant texts from, e.g., the list given by Wagner in the introduction to his Les Oasis, pp. 3- 6, and a search in the Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis for ‘Ort = Grosse Oase’). Moreover, our colleague R.S. Bagnall kindly made the digital file of his own index nominum for P.Kellis IV available to Worp.

An onomasticon of the eastern part of the Great Oasis, the Khargeh oasis, i.e. an
Onomasticon Hibiticum, had also been a desideratum for a long time. In the 1980s Salomons, when working on his publication of Bodleian Papyri (in P.Bodl., vol. I, in which appear several texts from the Khargeh oasis) had already compiled an onomasticon of the Great or Theban Oasis for his own use, based exclusively on the papyrological evidence then available to him. But the subsequent publication of the various volumes of ostraka from Douch, Aïn Waqfa and other texts from the Hibite nome, mainly by French papyrologists in the 1990s, had made this private onomasticon obsolete and underlined the desirability of an Onomasticon Hibiticum, especially if combined with an Onomasticon Mothiticum.

Thus the two of us decided to cooperate in compiling an Onomasticon Oasiticum: Salomons took responsability for texts from the eastern Oasis and the
incerta, while Worp took responsabilty for the listing of personal names in documents from the western Oasis.

We venture to think that our onomasticon as a reseach tool is of interest not only to Greek, Demotic and Coptic papyrologists focussing their research on documents from the Great Oasis, but also in general to
onomatologists, since the onomastics of the Great Oasis exhibit certain peculiarities not encountered elwewhere in Graeco-Roman Egypt. These deserve to be studied further. A comparison of the two main parts of the onomasticon shows, e.g., that certain names occur far more frequently in one particular half of the Great Oasis than in the other half (compare, e.g., the frequency of the name Πετεχω^ ν in the Khargeh Oasis [to date attested there several dozens of times] versus that in the Dakhleh Oasis [to date attested there only twice]).

Moreover, there is at least the theoretical possibility that some personal names occurring in these oases actually do not derive from either Greek or Egyptian, but that they come from other languages and cultures such as that of the Berber.

For obvious reasons the Onomasticon Oasiticum is divided into three parts, viz.
1) the Onomasticon Hibiticum,
2) a list of of personal names of people who certainly lived somewhere in the Great Oasis, but whose whereabouts in either the Mothite nome or the Hibite nome are no longer ascertainable. It is hoped that publication of new material will make it possible to transfer at least some persons definitely from this list to either of the oases. This 2nd section forms the transition from section 1 to section
3) the Onomasticon Mothiticum. After the Greek names in this part follows a section containing the names found in Coptic documents.

The present Onomasticon Oasiticum has been produced without any special financial support of any official institution. We are grateful to Dr F.A.J. Hoogendijk for her help in publishing it on the website of the Papyrological Institute of Leiden University. An important consideration in choosing this medium for our work is that the authors are allowed to change and update this Onomasticon easily, while there is no cost involved for any user...

Note to the revised edition (September 2009):
We have removed a number of typographical errors and added some new material, in particular from
Berichtigungsliste vol. XII (2009) and P.Kellis V (Coptic documentary texts). Morever, we are grateful in particular to our colleague R.S. Bagnall for kindly making the name indices of his forthcoming edition of Ostraka from Trimithis (O.Trim.) available to us already before the volume’s actual publication.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Eleven additional volumes online at the Oriental Institute

On September 15, 2009, The Oriental Institute published digital editions of eleven more volumes of Egyptological scholarship:

As part of its Electronic Publications Initiative and with the generous support of Misty and Lewis Gruber, the Oriental Institute Publications Office announces the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) publication of:

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Open Access Journals: La rivista Siti

La rivista Siti: Trimestrale di politica ed attualità culturale
ISSN 2038-7237

Il nostro è il Paese al mondo con il maggior numero di siti inclusi nella lista del patrimonio mondiale dell’umanità, ben quarantacinque. Quarantacinque tesori inestimabili di cui andiamo legittimamente orgogliosi e che l’Associazione Città e Siti Italiani Patrimonio Mondiale Unesco da oltre un decennio rappresenta e sostiene con caparbietà ed impegno per consentire al nostro Paese di esprimere al meglio le enormi potenzialità, anche come generatori di ricchezza, dei beni culturali e paesaggistici. Potenzialità che devono trovare pieno appoggio in politiche culturali e turistiche che sappiano puntare sulla qualità dell’offerta e sulle immense opportunità di crescita culturale che solo l’Italia, patria dell’arte e della bellezza per vocazione, può offrire...


Friday, September 4, 2009

Twelve additional volumes online at the Oriental Institute

On September 3, 2009, The Oriental Institute published digital editions of twelve more volumes of Egyptological scholarship:

As part of its Electronic Publications Initiative and with the generous support of Misty and Lewis Gruber, the Oriental Institute Publications Office announces the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) publication of:

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Revue d’études médiévales romanes
ISSN électronique : 2102-5614
La revue Atalaya est née en 1991 au sein de l’équipe de recherche fondée par le Professeur Michel Garcia de l’Université Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle. Ce dernier l’a dirigée pendant dix ans au cours desquels dix numéros ont été publiés de façon traditionnelle, dans une version « papier » (voir les numéros 1 à 10). Depuis 2001, date à laquelle Michel Garcia a fait valoir ses droits à la retraite, le Professeur Carlos Heusch, de l’École normale supérieure Lettres et sciences humaines de Lyon, en assure la direction. L’évolution des nouvelles technologies et la part croissante de l’internet dans les activités de recherche et dans la diffusion mondialisée des savoirs ont conduit la nouvelle direction de la revue, après mûre réflexion, a lui donner désormais une forme exclusivement électronique, en accord, d’ailleurs, avec une tendance de plus en plus affirmée dans les grandes universités du monde... [more]
Issues available in open access:

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Open Access Books: Digitale Sammlungen Archäologie und Ägyptologie: UB Heidelberg

Digitale Sammlungen Archäologie und Ägyptologie of the UB Heidelberg had just announced the following recently digitized books:

Werke zur Klassischen Archäologie:

Werke zur Ägyptologie:

For other publications from this digital library see Propylaeum - Virtuelle Fachbibliothek Altertumswissenschaften - Virtual Library Classical Studies