After serving for 7 years as the co-editor of the journal together with Victoria Yorke-Edwards, I have chosen to step down from my role as editor, while remaining on the Editorial Board. I had been on the Editorial Board before.
Recently I have become rather busy with work and family commitments, with only a minor involvement in academic archaeology to guarantee the time and effort that is required for running JOAD. To ensure that JOAD continues to be successful, this decision was necessary. This announcement arrives after one year of transition – we did not abandon the ship and continued publishing open archaeology datasets.
The new editors, Alessio Palmisano and Carmen Ting, will bring forward the journal’s mission with support from Anastasia Sakellariadi who has taken the very important role of editorial manager for the journal at Ubiquity Press.
As I look back to the past few years, the global scenario of open research data has changed a lot, becoming both more and more common but also more integrated with other facets of the broader open science movement, in archaeology too.
I think JOAD has a tremendous potential to improve all archaeological disciplines as an open science good practice. The peer review process is almost always a chance for authors to improve their work and the datasets they are about to publish, thanks to the many reviewers that volunteered to foster our activity. You can register now to become a reviewer in your field of specialization.
There are now other data journals that, while missing the specificity on archaeology, are geared towards a systematic habit of data sharing via data descriptor papers. This is both a challenge to the idea of a specific journal for each disciplinary field (something that mega-journals partly achieved, in the footsteps of PLOS One) and a big move towards open access publishing for research data, whatever the actual plan we choose to get there. I am convinced that the Journal of Open Archaeology Data will play its role even in this changed environment.