ABSTRACT
Scholarly communications stand at a crossroads. Long-established publication norms face disruption as researchers and their stakeholders shape and adapt to new dissemination models offered by the World Wide Web. Many researchers have seized the opportunity to experiment with ways to openly and collaboratively share a rich and more comprehensive picture of the archaeological past. Reform efforts to promote Open Access and Open Data have made impressive progress in recent years. However, communications in archaeology also face great challenges. Media interests continue to lobby for stronger and more punitive intellectual property laws. Such legislative efforts threaten to undermine much of the progress made by Open Access and Open Data advocates, since they would greatly increase the costs and legal risks in using the published archaeological record. Academic incentive and reward structures, coupled with deeply established notions of prestige, make many of our colleagues apathetic and sometimes overtly hostile toward new and more open forms of scholarship. Our current struggles in scholarly communications show how change can threaten existing institutional structures, funding models, modes of recognition and career advancement, and relationships between archaeology's stake-holding communities. In other words, publication has become political. Differing political visions help shape our expectations in issues like financial sustainability, the place of archaeological data in publishing, and which institutions should play a role in communicating and preserving the archaeological record. Recognising these various and often conflicting interests will make us better equipped to envision a more sustainable and equitable archaeology for the 21st century. Innovations in many areas, including Linked Open Data, Web services, and services for data citation and preservation, have enriched archaeology's information ecosystem. They also promise to make archaeology's knowledge contributions more broadly accessible and relevant to other disciplines and public communities. Optimistically, such innovations will take root in a changed landscape that better reflects and encourages the dynamism of our field.
