AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 158:1–2 (2015)
Editorial Embracing the Digital Future
With this issue the American Association of Physical Anthropologists renews our partnership with Wiley, the publisher of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology and the Yearbook of Physical Anthropology. The relationship has been productive since it began in 1980. The new contract extends into the rapidly developing digital future of academic publishing. Changes are in store, many of them significant improvements. But change can be hard to weather, too. In this brief editorial I would like to highlight and comment on some of the most important changes that are coming and what they mean for members of the AAPA. The most dramatic change, at least on the surface, is that AJPA, including the Yearbook, which is an official supplement to AJPA, will only be published in digital format starting in 2016 (next year). For those of us who came of age, academically, with AJPA in our mailboxes and on our shelves, this is a huge change. For AAPA members who wish, it will still be possible to purchase print copies of the journal for an extra charge, but those copies will be printed “on demand.” Print copies will no longer be available on library shelves. The electronic version of the journal will be the version of record. All AAPA members already have access to the electronic version of AJPA as part of their subscription. Many, if not most, of us work for institutions that provide digital access to the journal through their libraries. I even suspect that many, if not most, of us already do most of our scientific journal reading via digital versions, sometimes downloading PDFs, sometimes reading on line. Digital publishing offers so many advantages that it is rapidly becoming the dominant medium for academic publishing. Virtually all new scientific journals are digital-only, and the coming years will see the conversion of most existing journals to digital-only as well. Rather than bemoan the loss of the paper issue in our hands, it may help to consider the advantages that are in store as we shift to digital reading habits. If you have not already done so, I encourage you to try clicking on the “Enhanced HTML” version of an article of interest in AJPA when you access the journal digitally. If you do, you will find sidebar buttons that allow you to see and scroll through the references independently from the text of the article. You will have the capability to download any figure as a PowerPoint slide, complete with full citation, ready to be adapted to your own personal template. The references themselves will include links to the original sources, and citation data will be available. A button below the article title will provide information Ó 2014 WILEY PERIODICALS, INC.
and links to social media that have taken notice of the piece, continuously updated. These are all features that can only be provided in a digital format. There are other advantages as well. Figures will be published in color without charge. Rotating, 3D figures are possible. And, of course, linking to Supplementary Information, where important details and data appendices may be located, will be straightforward, no longer requiring a reader to put down the print issue and turn to their computer screen. All of these features are available on mobile devices as well, such as smart phones and tablets. The digital future, which is increasingly the digital present, of academic publishing will not only change our reading habits, it is making possible the greatest expansion of the dissemination of scientific knowledge since the printing press. All of us who work in resource poor areas of the world know that the spread of the infrastructure for digital communication has leapfrogged all other infrastructural development. Access to the internet is much less of an obstacle than access to a library or regular mail delivery virtually everywhere in the world. Access to an internet connection is rapidly becoming the only barrier to access to scientific literature as well. The Open Access movement in scientific publishing has become firmly established, with official imprimaturs from government and independent funding agencies. In partnership with our publisher, Wiley, the AAPA and AJPA are working to maximize the accessibility to the products of our scientific effort. AJPA already offers optional “gold” (immediate and universal) open access to authors for a fee comparable to that charged by other Open Access journals. Now all articles published in the Yearbook of Physical Anthropology will be made permanently freely available, immediately upon publication, without a fee. This should help make the Yearbook the most widely accessible medium for review articles in our field. The funding in our field does not regularly allow most of us to cover “gold” open access fees, however. Recognizing this, all articles published in AJPA are eligible for “green” open access, a level that allows the accepted manuscript version of a paper to be made freely available on an institutional digital archive after an embargo period of one year. Independently, the AAPA has begun work on establishing such an archive that will support
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.22679 Published online 2 December 2014 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).
2
EMBRACING THE DIGITAL FUTURE
the broadest possible dissemination of the scholarly productivity of our members. This archive will hopefully be able to contain other content as well, such as talks and lectures, and even data sets. The US federal government has already signaled that it wants not only the published results of federally funded research to be freely available, but the data generated by that research as well. Developing an AAPA archive now will allow us to
American Journal of Physical Anthropology
get ahead of the wave of change rather than being overwhelmed by it. For the rest of 2015 the American Journal of Physical Anthropology will continue to ship in its printed form. Many of us will cherish these final print issues, perhaps placing a ritual bookend at the terminus the row on our shelves. But that terminus does not mark an end, only a transition.
Editorial Embracing the Digital Future
With this issue the American Association of Physical Anthropologists renews our partnership with Wiley, the publisher of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology and the Yearbook of Physical Anthropology. The relationship has been productive since it began in 1980. The new contract extends into the rapidly developing digital future of academic publishing. Changes are in store, many of them significant improvements. But change can be hard to weather, too. In this brief editorial I would like to highlight and comment on some of the most important changes that are coming and what they mean for members of the AAPA. The most dramatic change, at least on the surface, is that AJPA, including the Yearbook, which is an official supplement to AJPA, will only be published in digital format starting in 2016 (next year). For those of us who came of age, academically, with AJPA in our mailboxes and on our shelves, this is a huge change. For AAPA members who wish, it will still be possible to purchase print copies of the journal for an extra charge, but those copies will be printed “on demand.” Print copies will no longer be available on library shelves. The electronic version of the journal will be the version of record. All AAPA members already have access to the electronic version of AJPA as part of their subscription. Many, if not most, of us work for institutions that provide digital access to the journal through their libraries. I even suspect that many, if not most, of us already do most of our scientific journal reading via digital versions, sometimes downloading PDFs, sometimes reading on line. Digital publishing offers so many advantages that it is rapidly becoming the dominant medium for academic publishing. Virtually all new scientific journals are digital-only, and the coming years will see the conversion of most existing journals to digital-only as well. Rather than bemoan the loss of the paper issue in our hands, it may help to consider the advantages that are in store as we shift to digital reading habits. If you have not already done so, I encourage you to try clicking on the “Enhanced HTML” version of an article of interest in AJPA when you access the journal digitally. If you do, you will find sidebar buttons that allow you to see and scroll through the references independently from the text of the article. You will have the capability to download any figure as a PowerPoint slide, complete with full citation, ready to be adapted to your own personal template. The references themselves will include links to the original sources, and citation data will be available. A button below the article title will provide information Ó 2014 WILEY PERIODICALS, INC.
and links to social media that have taken notice of the piece, continuously updated. These are all features that can only be provided in a digital format. There are other advantages as well. Figures will be published in color without charge. Rotating, 3D figures are possible. And, of course, linking to Supplementary Information, where important details and data appendices may be located, will be straightforward, no longer requiring a reader to put down the print issue and turn to their computer screen. All of these features are available on mobile devices as well, such as smart phones and tablets. The digital future, which is increasingly the digital present, of academic publishing will not only change our reading habits, it is making possible the greatest expansion of the dissemination of scientific knowledge since the printing press. All of us who work in resource poor areas of the world know that the spread of the infrastructure for digital communication has leapfrogged all other infrastructural development. Access to the internet is much less of an obstacle than access to a library or regular mail delivery virtually everywhere in the world. Access to an internet connection is rapidly becoming the only barrier to access to scientific literature as well. The Open Access movement in scientific publishing has become firmly established, with official imprimaturs from government and independent funding agencies. In partnership with our publisher, Wiley, the AAPA and AJPA are working to maximize the accessibility to the products of our scientific effort. AJPA already offers optional “gold” (immediate and universal) open access to authors for a fee comparable to that charged by other Open Access journals. Now all articles published in the Yearbook of Physical Anthropology will be made permanently freely available, immediately upon publication, without a fee. This should help make the Yearbook the most widely accessible medium for review articles in our field. The funding in our field does not regularly allow most of us to cover “gold” open access fees, however. Recognizing this, all articles published in AJPA are eligible for “green” open access, a level that allows the accepted manuscript version of a paper to be made freely available on an institutional digital archive after an embargo period of one year. Independently, the AAPA has begun work on establishing such an archive that will support
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.22679 Published online 2 December 2014 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).
2
EMBRACING THE DIGITAL FUTURE
the broadest possible dissemination of the scholarly productivity of our members. This archive will hopefully be able to contain other content as well, such as talks and lectures, and even data sets. The US federal government has already signaled that it wants not only the published results of federally funded research to be freely available, but the data generated by that research as well. Developing an AAPA archive now will allow us to
American Journal of Physical Anthropology
get ahead of the wave of change rather than being overwhelmed by it. For the rest of 2015 the American Journal of Physical Anthropology will continue to ship in its printed form. Many of us will cherish these final print issues, perhaps placing a ritual bookend at the terminus the row on our shelves. But that terminus does not mark an end, only a transition.
