Hesperia Goes Open Access!

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Hesperia Goes Open Access!

In a notice this morning, Andrew Reinhard, Director of Publications at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens has made the following important announcement. Andrew Reinhard and his colleagues in the Publications Department and the Publications Committee of the School’s Managing Committee are to be congratulated for making this important move.

Hesperia Provides Open Access to More than 1,500 Articles
07/11/2012

The American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) continues its strong commitment to open scholarship by providing easy, free access to past issues of Hesperia. The quarterly joins nearly 1,200 other international open access journals in ancient studies as listed in The Ancient World Online. As of July 11th, over 1,500 Hesperia articles (1932 to 2009) are available as downloadable PDFs on the ASCSA’s website. Through a content-sharing agreement negotiated between the ASCSA and JSTOR, the online host of the journal, all articles beyond the three-year “moving wall” can be freely distributed on the School’s website for individual use. This initiative was unanimously endorsed by the Publications Committee of the School’s Managing Committee.

“Making Hesperia open access helps the journal fulfill the ASCSA’s mission of providing resources for scholarly work, and disseminating research,” Andrew Reinhard, the ASCSA’s Director of Publications, said. “We’re providing information on the history and archaeology of the Greek world to as wide an audience as possible. Our content is more readily available to anyone who wants to use it.”

Hesperia Editor Tracey Cullen agrees. “It is exciting to be able to offer subscribers and non-subscribers alike nearly the whole run of Hesperia on the ASCSA website. In addition to contributing to scholarship in our field, open access to Hesperia will draw in new readers and heighten the journal's profile around the world. I'm thrilled.”

The webpage is intended primarily for the use of individuals who do not have easy access to JSTOR. Users can find specific articles by using the page’s search box that automatically filters the results. Readers can access an article by clicking on its “Download” link and reading on-screen with PDF software (e.g., Adobe Reader), or they can save the article to a computer, tablet, or other reading device. Online access is not required to read these articles once they have been downloaded, and there is no limit to the number of articles that readers can save for future use.

“Not everyone has JSTOR access and not everyone has an Internet connection in the field,” Reinhard said. “Making these articles freely available without requiring an Internet connection or even a subscription should help people have the information they need on whatever device they’re using in the trench, camp, and excavation house.”

For users with an Internet connection and JSTOR access, ASCSA also hosts a webpage for browsing issues for each volume year for the full run of Hesperia. Readers can search here by author, title, site, period, or keyword. Clicking on an issue number calls up all articles in that issue. Clicking on an article’s title retrieves metadata about that article and a stable link to its home on JSTOR.

The articles on the open access page are free of digital rights management (DRM), but are protected under the Creative Commons BY-NC license that allows for downloading and sharing articles, and require that the ASCSA and Hesperia be credited as the source. The articles cannot be used for commercial purposes.

Each January another year of Hesperia will be made available as open access. The 2010 volume year will be posted online in time for the 2013 AIA/APA joint annual meeting in Seattle.

Questions about open access Hesperia can be directed to Andrew Reinhard, Director of Publications.