New archaeology journal with strong stance on open science

[Ben Marwick]

Hi everyone,

You may have seen the new Springer journal Journal of Palaeolithic Archaeology The inaugural editorial is online here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41982-017-0001-7 (open access).

The editors' position on open science is quite noteworthy:

"As for open science, we have set the requirement for data publishing high, and we want to see original data sets in the supplementary information or linked to other journals dedicated to the publication of data."

Their instructions to authors gives more details and also mentions that data can be deposited in a trustworthy repository (http://www.springer.com/social+sciences/anthropology+%26+archaeology/journal/41982?detailsPage=pltci_3247911), which I think is a much better option than supplementary information (since the format is often garbled by the publisher, and it sits behind a paywall). I'll be curious to see how consistently enforced the policy is by the editors. 

If you are on an editorial board for a journal that lacks an open science statement like this, you might find this JPA approach useful as a template to suggest to your editor some updates to journal policy. 

Similarly, when we do peer reviews we can encourage authors to deposit the data behind figures and tables in trustworthy repositories, and add a DOI to the paper to link to the dataset, nothing that this is a requirement for some journals. 

best,

Ben