I’ve been distracted by the Recovery.gov work lately, and I almost missed a very interesting read that comes from Nisha Doshi, Publications Assistant for the Public Library of Science.

In her March 17 post to the PLoS blog, Doshi provides an informative summary of the archaeology-related publications that have come out recently in PLoS ONE, a peer-reviewed scientific journal for the speedy publication of research in science and medicine. The nine publications and one interview she highlights in her post are primarily in the field of archaeogenetics and will be of interest to many DDIG members. Peter Suber, over at Open Access News picked up the story here (and scooped me :) BTW).

Doshi sees these recent publications as indicating that “the open-access model has an important role to play in archaeology.” While this suite of high-caliber publications is encouraging, we still have a long way to go in promoting open access. PLoS ONE is not necessarily a suitable publication venue for many of the less science-heavy archaeological and anthropological studies. Access to archaeological research would be greatly improved with more open access venues dedicated to the field (such as Fornvännen <http://fornvannen.se>, the Swedish journal of archaeology and the Journal of Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Archaeology<http://www.jiia.it/>), as well as a dedicated repository for self-archived copies of non-open-access publications in archaeology.

A subject repository would be wonderful. Does anyone know of ongoing efforts for this in archaeology?