New Open Access Series from UC Berkeley: California Classical Studies

The University of California, Berkeley's Department of Classics has established a new open access series, California Classical Studies.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The series is intended to provide a peer-reviewed open-access venue for disseminating basic research, data-heavy research, including archaeological research, and highly specialized research of the kind that is either hard to place with the leading publishers in Classics or extremely expensive for libraries and individuals when produced by a leading academic publisher. . . .

Apart from aiming to publish 15 titles in the first three to four years, the startup phase will also test different workflows for production and assess the impact of various pricing models for Print on Demand and ebook versions. Some works will have images, plans, datasets, or other material offered only online. While every work will be available in full for page view from the date of first appearance, the series will experiment with the feasibility of shorter and longer embargo periods, or no embargo period, before free download of a full PDF is made available. Finally, the project is intended to find a path to sustainability, which will depend partly on how much revenue can be generated from sales and how far down production costs can be driven, but also on the willingness of institutions, administrators, and individual scholars with access to research grants to make an initial investment in open-access scholarly communication rather than bear the costs of library purchases and especially of ongoing licensing fees for digital material controlled by major publishers.

| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |