Open Access

I'm a fan of Open Access, I understand it has some limitations in terms of implementation but I honestly think that when you are doing archaeology (or any research) and you want to make it relevant to the communities that you are working with/around then its important that you make your research available to them.  As someone who wants to do community archaeology I think that open access is extremely important to the research process.  Open access will allow the people we work with to read and comment on the papers I write for the broader archaeological community.

Anyone interested in the arguments for open access should check out the PhD Comics Video on it via Youtube.

Hopefully, when I start getting publishable data from Nuttallburg I'll be able to publish it as Open Access material so that its available, for free, to those who do not have academic affiliations.  I remember, as an undergraduate I went to a school that didn't have full access to every database.  There were a lot of times, I was hindered by this as many of the archaeological journals were the ones that my school didn't have access to.  If I can make my work open access, I will because that was a real problem for me.  However, right now open access carries a fee between 1000 and 5000 dollars if you decide to publish in a journal that is not specifically public access.  If that's the case in a couple of years, and I cannot find an affordable open access solution then I'll have to look into that idea at the end of the Youtube video - making my paper's text available for download online.

But, this is all a bit premature, I don't have publishable data yet and won't be publishing for about another year at the very least (probably longer).