Supporting researchers in Archaeology with Diamond Open Access: The experience of Transformations. A DARIAH Journal

In order to support their work, Archaeologists manage and use a large range of digital methods and tools (3D techniques, notebooks, data visualisation) - often much more so than scholars from other Humanities disciplines. Still, they face issues or legal constraints when it comes to publishing their final research in Open Access, because commercial publishers still dominate the  scholarly publication sector. Researchers then have to be compliant with restrictive publishers' access policies. Additionally, parts of their research outputs might also end up being limited in their accessibility due to their provenance (cultural heritage).

The DARIAH Research Infrastructure can help the archaeological community to better embrace Open Access practices in a variety of ways. In this contribution, we would like to emphasize, in particular, how the newly launched DARIAH journal Transformations^[1] can contribute to this dynamic. The goal of this new publication form is not to add yet another Digital Humanities journal to the publication landscape, but to provide a genuinely trusted, non-commercial platform for documenting various methodological and research activities in the arts and humanities. Processes of data gathering and processing, annotation and modeling, analysis and interpretation play a key role in the journal.

Transformations relies on a Diamond Open Access publishing platform, Episciences, a scholarly publication model in which journals and platforms do not charge fees to either authors or readers[2], a model that is currently gaining traction with an increasing number of researchers worldwide[3]. This paper explores how Transformations can be instrumental in supporting archaeological researchers through this novel form of publication.