About

 

• Goals
• History
• Who We Are
• Support

 

Goals

1. Provide a virtual place where archaeozoologists worldwide can "meet" to share their work, ask questions, announce new developments in the field, and have continuing discussions around member-posed topics.
2. Enhance scholarly communication by enabling richer discussion and peer evaluation of conference presentations. BoneCommons enables conference participants to review presentations and engage in discussions long after the physical meeting is over.
3. Experiment with open access and open licensing to enhance the value of scholaraly communication by making content easier to find, reproduce, share, evaluate, and incorporate into future scholarly works and educational resources.
4. Invite a broader and more diverse community to explore zooarchaeological scholarship via the Internet. Opening access to our work will help zooarchaeologists engage with the public and more widely demonstrate the contributaions and value of archaeological scholarship.

 

History

In November of 2005, the ICAZ Executive Committee moved to create BoneCommons, an Internet-based resource for its members, aimed at promoting and facilitating zooarchaeology worldwide. BoneCommons is part of a new movement to provide supplementary virtual resources to "live" anthropological and archaeological conferences. The first BoneCommons-type forum was AnthroCommons, created for the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in 2004. AnthroCommons was an entirely volunteer effort on the part of the Alexandria Archive Institute and Cultural Heritage International. The goal of creating the forum was to make the AAA meeting content accessible to those who could not attend after the conference struggled with Hilton Hotel strike. AnthroCommons was an early experiment in opening access to scholarly content via the Internet.

BoneCommons expands on the goals of AnthroCommons by providing not only a virtual place for conference papers to be shared and discussed, but also an entire suite of forums where the zooarchaeological community can share resources.

 

Who We Are

BoneCommons represents a collaborative effort of ICAZ and the Alexandria Archive Institute to provide online resources for the zooarchaeological community. BoneCommons was developed by a team at the Alexandria Archive Institute, a California-based nonprofit organization with a core goal of enhancing scholarly communication. By enabling the free sharing and distribution of works, open licensing helps people to realize the full potential of Internet communication. Thus, BoneCommons content can be shared between colleagues, freely used in student coursepacks, and enjoyed by the public without the legal ambiguities, restrictions, and risks inherent in standard copyright. This open sharing of scholarship will stand as an important accomplishment in meeting ICAZ’s goals of facilitating research, communication, and cooperation between zooarchaeologists and scholars in other related disciplines.

	Sarah Whitcher Kansa	BoneCommons Chair and Copyright Compliance Officer
	Angela Smith	Technical Developer
	Eric Kansa	Licensing and Documentation
	AnthroCommons team	Forum Prototype Development

 

Funding for this project is provided by: