Ahead of the curve: adventures in e-publishing in Internet Archaeology

Abstract

The e-journal Internet Archaeology was first published in 1996. At the time it was the first fully online peer-reviewed e-journal, in any discipline. Now, 18 years later, it is in its 38th issue and is still publishing rich interactive content, including monograph length hypertext articles, online databases and Geographic Information System (GIS) interfaces, virtual reality models, and multimedia sound and movie files. All content is archived by the UK’s Archaeology Data Service (ADS), and the journal has won several awards for its creative exemplars of linked e-publications and archives. When Internet Archaeology was established, the Internet itself was still in its infancy. The journal has had a transformative effect on scholarly communication in archaeology, and a significant impact on the humanities more broadly. This paper reviews the challenges faced in developing a fully online journal and the particular difficulties in establishing a sound publishing business model, setting them in the wider context of developments in electronic publication, Open Access and Open Data.