About

Focus and Scope

JOAD publishes data papers, which do not contain research results but rather a concise description of a dataset, and where to find it. Papers will only be accepted for datasets that authors agree to make freely available in a public repository. This means that they have been deposited in a data repository under an open licence (such as a Creative Commons Zero licence), and are therefore freely available to anyone with an internet connection, anywhere in the world.

A data paper is a publication that is designed to make other researchers aware of data that is of potential use to them. As such it describes the methods used to create the dataset, its structure, its reuse potential, and a link to its location in a repository. It is important to note that a data paper does not replace a research article, but rather complements it. When mentioning the data behind a study, a research paper should reference the data paper for further details. The data paper similarly should contain references to any research papers associated with the dataset.

Any kind of archaeological data is acceptable, including for example: geophysical data; quantitative or qualitative data; images; notebooks; excavation data, software, etc.

Publication Frequency

This journal publishes continuously, with papers coming online as soon as they have passed peer review.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. There is no embargo on the journal’s publications. Submission and acceptance dates, along with publication dates, are made available on the PDF format for each paper.

Authors of articles published remain the copyright holders and grant third parties the right to use, reproduce, and share the article according to the Creative Commons license agreement.

Authors are encouraged to publish their data in recommended repositories. For a list of generic and subject specific repositories that meet our peer review criteria, see here.

Indexing, Archiving and Dissemination

Ubiquity is committed to making content discoverable and accessible through indexing services. As such all content is archived around the world to ensure long-term availability.

Ubiquity supports open and transparent practices in scholarly research and is a signatory of The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), a global initiative to improve the ways in which researchers and the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated. In accordance with DORA, Ubiquity makes available a range of article and journal-level metrics to avoid over-reliance on any single assessment tool.

Our journals use OPERAS metrics - an open source platform that Ubiquity has helped develop as part of the HIRMEOS project, originating from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. OPERAS metrics provides a comprehensive and transparent mechanism for collecting and aggregating article usage metrics.

Journal statistics (including submission numbers, the acceptance rate, and turnaround times) are provided and updated annually.

Evaluation and Impact

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): Seal of Approval
Journal Citation Indicator: 1.06 - 37/163 (2024)
Journal Impact Factor: 1.1 (2024)
Scopus CiteScore: 2.2 - 52/413 in Archaeology (2024)
Scimago H-index: 6 (2024)
Scimago Journal Rank (SJR): 0.235 (2024)

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal is indexed by the following services:

Web of Science, Emerging Sources Citation Index
Scopus
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals
ERIH Plus
BDS Bibliographic Data Services
Chronos
CNKI
EBSCO (Host and Knowledge Base)
Ex Libris
Google Scholar
J-Gate
OCLC
OpenAIRE

Additionally, the journal is registered with Sherpa Romeo, and all article metadata and references are deposited with Crossref.

As the journal grows, additional indexes will be added. If the journal is not indexed by your preferred service, please contact us or alternatively by making an indexing request directly with the service.

Archiving

To ensure permanency of all publications, this journal also utilises CLOCKSS, and LOCKSS archiving systems to create permanent archives for the purposes of preservation and restoration.

In addition, the journal is available for harvesting via OAI-PMH.

Journal Statistics

Core journal statistics for the 2024 volume:

Submissions received¹	23
Reviews requested²	45
Reviews received³	29
Total Rejections⁴	8
...of which, Desk rejects⁵	8
Acceptances⁶	15
Acceptance rate⁷	65.22%
Time from submission to publication⁸	117 days

Definitions
¹Number of new articles received by the journal
²Number of peer review invitation emails that were sent out
³Number of completed peer review reports received
⁴Total number of articles rejected (including desk rejects)
⁵Number of articles rejected prior to peer review
⁶Number of articles that received a 'Accept for publication' decision
⁷Number of acceptances, as a percentage, against the total number of final decisions
⁸'Mean' average from submission to publication for all publications in the volume

Recommended repositories

The following repositories meet our peer-review requirements and are recommended for the archiving of JOAD datasets. Please contact us if you would like to use another repository or recommend that we add it to our list.

International repositories	National repositories	Institutional repositories
JOAD Dataverse Archaeology Data Service Figshare Open Context tDAR Zenodo	Arachne (Germany) ARCHE (Austria) DANS (Netherlands) Mappa (Italy) SND (Sweden)	UCL Discovery

Location	http://thedata.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/JOAD
Focus and suitability	Data can be uploaded to the JOAD Dataverse Repository designed specifically for papers in the Journal of Open Archaeology Data. We recommended this repository to authors because it is managed entirely by the JOAD editorial staff and ensures maximum interoperability between datasets and data papers.
Cost	Free for all JOAD authors.
Licenses	CC0
Identifiers used	DOI
Sustainability	The Dataverse Network is an open-source application funded by Harvard University.
Deposit instructions	Depositing data into the Dataverse is currently done manually: Go to the following link: http://thedata.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/JOAD and register for an account. Once logged in, create a new study and follow the instructions to deposit your data. Ensure that your data conforms to the JOAD peer review requirements You will receive a handle ID shortly after your submit your data. Please add this to the identifier field of your data paper. Once your paper has passed peer-review, the JOAD team will add the citation to your Dataverse entry.

Location	http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/
Focus and suitability	Datasets concerning archaeology and the historic environment. Material is accepted from all over the world as long as it is in English (see scope of collections). The ADS provides specialised services for datasets requiring digitisation, conversion to other formats, or with customised display requirments. The ADS is the mandated repository for research projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Natural Environment Research Council. It is also a member of the Digital Preservation Coalition and was awarded the Data Seal of Approval in 2011.
Cost	Free for doctoral students Free for grey literature reports attached to a completed OASIS record Other data: Ingest and dissemination costs are by negotiation (e.g. provision of an online queriable database or GIS interface), plus storage and refreshment costs (see charging policy)
Licenses	CC-BY (must be requested)
Identifiers used	DOI
Sustainability	The Archaeology Data Service is funded by multiple higher education and government agencies including the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and Natural Environment Research Council (see their funders page).
Deposit instructions	Depositing data associated with a JOAD data paper in the ADS is currently done manually: Contact the ADS to arrange your deposit (see their How to Deposit instructions). Check that your deposit also conforms to the JOAD peer review requirements. When the data has been made public on the ADS site, it will be assigned a DOI. Please enter this in your JOAD data paper under Repository Location. Once your JOAD paper has passed peer review and been published, please ask for this to be added as a reference to the ADS pages for your data.

Location	https://arche.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/browser/
Focus and suitability	ARCHE (A Resource Centre for the HumanitiEs) is a service that offers stable and persistent hosting as well as the dissemination of digital research data and resources for the Austrian humanities community. ARCHE welcomes data from all humanities fields.
Cost	Free
Licenses	Repository strongly encourages open access for data, which is essential for reuse and thus longevity of data. They suggest the use of CC-BY (CC - Attribution) or CC-BY-SA (CC - Attribution-ShareAlike). When depositing code or software, consider using specific software licences like BSD or GPL.
Identifiers used	Handle
Sustainability	ARCHE is the successor of the repository project CLARIN Centre Vienna / Language Resources Portal (CCV/LRP) initiated by the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2014. In 2017 ARCHE replaced CCV/LRP extending its mission by offering advanced and reliable data management and depositing services open to a broader range of humanities disciplines in Austria. ARCHE is a service offered by the ACDH-CH, a national centre of expertise founded with the intention to promote the change towards the digital paradigms in the humanities. ARCHE was awarded the CoreTrustSeal in 2017, a core level certification for trustworthy data repository systems. To learn more, visit coretrustseal.org. ARCHE has also been recognised as a service providing centre (B-Centre) by the European Research Infrastructure CLARIN.
Deposit instructions	For Deposit instructions, see https://arche.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/browser/deposition-process

Location	http://www.dans.knaw.nl/
Focus and suitability	The DANS data archive collection contains datasets in the fields of humanities, archaeology, geospatial sciences and behavioural and social sciences. The archaeological collection comprises the e-Depot Nederlandse Archeologie, which accepts reports and datasets, either from Dutch archaeologists, or pertaining to Dutch archaeology.
Cost	Free
Licenses	No licence specified other than "open access". For more details please see DANS Conditions of Use on the reuse of deposited data.
Identifiers used	URN
Sustainability	DANs is funded by the Dutch government, and operates under the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).
Deposit instructions	Depositing data associated with a JOAD data paper in the DANS data archive is currently done manually: Go to DANS and follow the instructions for depositing archaeological data. Check that your deposit also conforms to the JOAD peer review requirements. When the data has been made public on the DANS site, it will be assigned a URN identifier. Please enter this in your JOAD data paper under Repository Location. Once your JOAD paper has passed peer review and been published, please add this to the description field on the DANS Research Project screen.

Location	http://figshare.com
Focus and suitability	Figshare takes data from all subject areas, and is suitable for small to medium sized archaeological datasets that do not require specialised curation. '"Figshare allows you to share all of your data, negative results and unpublished figures."
Cost	Free. "Figshare gives users unlimited public space and 1GB of private storage space for free."
Licenses	"All figures, media and multiple file uploads are published under a CC-BY license. All datasets are published under CC0."
Identifiers used	Handle
Sustainability	"Figshare is an independent body that receives support from Digital Science. 'Digital Science's relationship with figshare represents the first of its kind in the company's history: a community- based, open science project that will retain its autonomy whilst receiving support from the division.'"
Deposit instructions	Depositing data associated with a JOAD data paper in Figshare is currently done manually: Create an account with figshare. Upload your data as either a fileset (most appropriate if you have multiple files) or a dataset. Check that your deposit also conforms to the JOAD peer review requirements. When the data has been made public on the figshare site, it will be assigned a handle identifier. Please enter this in your JOAD data paper under Repository Location. Once your JOAD paper has passed peer review and been published, please add the reference to the description field in figshare, and add the JOAD DOI to the links also.

Location	https://digitallib.unipi.it/it/archivio/MOD-Mappa-Open-Data-archive/
Focus and suitability	The MOD (MAPPA Open Data) archive contains datasets in the fields of archaeology and related disciplines. The archive accepts grey literature and datasets either from Italian archaeologists, or pertaining to Italian archaeology. Most data are from Italy but the archive accepts submissions from any location.
Cost	Free
Licenses	CC-BY, CC0
Identifiers used	DOI
Sustainability	The MOD is funded by University of Pisa and Regione Toscana, and operates in collaboration with MiBAC (Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities).
Deposit instructions	Depositing data associated with a JOAD data paper in Mappa is currently done manually: Contact MOD to arrange your data deposition Check that your deposit conforms to the JOAD peer review requirements. When the data has been made public on the MOD site, it will be assigned a DOI. Please enter this in your JOAD data paper under Repository Location. Once your JOAD paper has passed peer review and been published, please aask for the the reference to be added to the MOD page of your data.

Location	http://opencontext.org/
Focus and suitability	Primary field research from archaeology and related disciplines. Most data is from US-based projects but the archive accepts submissions from any location.
Cost	"Publication fees vary between $250 and $6000 depending on the complexity and size of the contributed database and related content." See Data Publication Guidelines for Contributors for details.
Licenses	CC-BY, CC0
Identifiers used	ARK
Sustainability	Open Context is run by the Alexandria Archive Institute, a California-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, and has been funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Deposit instructions	Depositing data associated with a JOAD data paper in Open Context is currently done manually: Contact Open Context to arrange your deposit (see their guidelines). Check that your deposit also conforms to the JOAD peer review requirements. When the data has been made public on the Open Context site, you will be provided with a persistent weblink containing an ARK ID code. Please enter this in your JOAD data paper under Repository Location. Once your JOAD paper has passed peer review and been published, please add this as a reference in the Project/Collection Overview section in Open Context.

Location	http://snd.gu.se
Focus and suitability	The Swedish National Data Service (SND) is a service organization for Swedish research within the humanities, social sciences, and health sciences. SND helps enable Swedish and international researchers gain access to existing digital data within and outside of Sweden.
Cost	Free
Licenses	Determined by submitter: CC0 and CC-BY accepted.
Identifiers used	DOI
Sustainability	SND is funded by the Swedish Research Council as a national center located at University of Gothenburg, and an important part of Sweden’s research infrastructure.
Deposit instructions	To deposit data associated with a JOAD paper in SND please follow these steps: Visit the following link: http://snd.gu.se/en/deposit-data/webform Upload your data using the web form and input relevant metadata. Check that your deposit also conforms to the JOAD peer review requirements. You will receive a confirmation e-mail, and will then be contacted by SND staff about possible metadata and documentation issues. Once your JOAD paper has passed peer review and been published, please add the DOI and citation to the SND metadata.

Location	http://www.tdar.org/
Focus and suitability	tDAR is an international digital archive and repository that houses data about archaeological investigations, research, resources, and scholarship.
Cost	http://www.tdar.org/about/pricing/
Licenses	Creative Commons by Attribution, unless otherwise specified
Identifiers used	DOI
Sustainability	tDAR's use, development, and maintenance are governed by Digital Antiquity, an organization dedicated to ensuring the long-term preservation of irreplaceable archaeological data and to broadening access to these data. Digital Antiquity's key objectives include fostering the use of tDAR and ensuring its financial, technical, and professional sustainability.
Deposit instructions	Depositing data associated with a JOAD data paper in tDAR is currently done manually: Go to tDAR and follow the instructions for creating or editing a dataset. Check that your deposit also conforms to the JOAD peer review requirements. When the data has been made public on the tDAR site, it will be assigned a permanent identifier. Please enter this in your JOAD data paper under Repository Location. Once your JOAD paper has passed peer review and been published, please add this into the Resource Notes section in tDAR.

Location	http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/
Focus and suitability	UCL Discovery showcases UCL's research outputs, giving access to journal articles, book chapters, conference proceedings, digital web resources, theses, datasets, software and much more, from all UCL disciplines. The repository also enables UCL researchers to comply with research funder policies on open access.
Cost	Free to UCL researchers.
Licenses	All open licences permitted
Identifiers used	DOI
Sustainability	UCL Discovery is maintained by UCL, a major international research institution ranked seventh in the world's top ten universities by the QS World University Rankings (2011).
Deposit instructions	Depositing data associated with a JOAD data paper in UCL Discovery is currently done manually: Log in to the UCL RPS system. Follow the general guide to depositing, with the following modifications: Expand the publications window so that it includes software, and click 'Add new'. If your software consists of more than one file, please compress these into one zip file and upload this. Place your licence information in the Notes section. Example text: "This software is licensed under a GNU General Public License (GPL)." Check that your deposit also conforms to the JOAD peer review requirements. When your software has been made public on the UCL discovery site, notify the JOAD editor and you will receive a DOI. Please enter this in the DOI field. Once your JOAD paper has passed peer review and been published, please enter the reference for it into the Notes section in UCL Discovery (e.g. 'This software is described in the following software paper: …').

Location	https://zenodo.org/
Focus and suitability	ZENODO welcomes all research outputs from all fields of science in any format and size. ZENODO is furthermore integrated into reporting lines for research funded by the European Commission via OpenAIRE. Ubiquity Press therefore recoommends this repository for data funded by the European Commission.
Cost	Free
Licenses	Any appropriate license accepted including CC0, Open Data Commons Licence, Open Government Licence.
Identifiers used	DOI
Sustainability	ZENODO is developed and operated by CERN under the EU-funded OpenAIREplus project in synergy with other large services running on the same software such as CERN Document Server and INSPIRE-HEP. All uploads are stored in the same cloud infrastructure as research data from CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The entire platform is further more fully open - metadata is licensed under CC0, it's source code is licensed under GNU GPL and ZENODO furthermore allows harvesting of the entire repository by external sources.
Deposit instructions	To deposit data associated with a JOAD paper in ZENODO please follow these steps: Create an account with ZENODO. Upload your data and edit metadata such as title, description, authors. Check that your deposit also conforms to the JOAD peer review requirements. The data will go public immediately after submission and is instantly assigned a Digital Object Identifier. Please enter this in your JOAD software paper under Repository Location. Once your JOAD paper has passed peer review and been published, please add the DOI and citation to the ZENODO Related Identifiers field.

FAQ

What kinds of data can I publish?

All kinds of data are welcome. We are particularly interested in data that may have reuse potential or which is required to validate your research. Many research outputs meet these requirements. For example:

GIS data and maps
image and video data
site plans and notebooks
quantitative and qualitative survey data
ethongraphic data (can be anonymised)
artefact illustrations and measurements
grey literature
remote sensing data
bioarchaeological data
etc.

What is a data paper?

How do I submit a data paper?

Please see our ‘how to submit a data paper’ page.

How does JOAD peer review work?

Please see our overview of the peer review process.

Which open license should I apply to my data?

We recommend the following licenses for open data:

All of the above licenses carry an obligation for anyone using the data to properly attribute it. The main differences are whether this is a social requirement (CC0 and PDDL) or a legal one (CC-BY and ODC-BY). The less restrictive your license, the greater the potential for reuse.

We do not recommend licenses that impose commercial or other restrictions on the use of data. Generally, such licenses can prevent use of data by charities and the media, and make the remixing of data from various international sources legally problematic. At the same time, why impose commercial restrictions on publicly funded data, such that the public themselves are not able to build profitable or sustainable solutions that utilise it? There are of course some situations in which data must have a more restrictive license (e.g. funder requirements), and the editorial team will consider these on a case-by-case basis.

Please see our list of recommended repositories for examples. Other repositories may be acceptable, provided they meet the criteria below. Please contact us if you would like to discuss adding a new repository to the recommended list.

What are the criteria for a repository to be accepted?

Data must be made available via a suitable repository. To meet our acceptance criteria, repositories must:

be suitable for the type of data involved
be sustainable (i.e. it must have funding and plans in place to ensure the long-term preservation of the data)
allow open licences
provide persistent identifiers (e.g. DOI, handle, ARC etc.)

What does ‘open’ mean?

The term ‘open’ in this context is well described by the Open Knowledge Foundation: “A piece of content or data is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share-alike.”

What are the benefits of publishing data?

Allowing others to reuse your data leads to more efficient science, as well as new kinds of studies previously not possible that involve the combination of multiple data sources. At the same time open data can be reused by the wider public for a range of purposes including teaching, journalism and citizen science projects. These and other benefits are summarised in the diagram on our about page.

Making research outputs available for others to work with and build upon is part of the social contract of academia. Data papers mean that data you have released can be cited and that those citations can be tracked. This is not only an indirect measure of impact and therefore important for career progression, but it can also help you understand who is using the data, and lead to new collaborations.

Do I have to make my data open?

It is difficult to argue that the results of publicly funded research should not be made publicly available, and many funding bodies are increasing the degree to which they encourage open archiving. We believe that the benefits listed aboveare already a strong incentive to publish data openly, but there are some occasions (e.g. source material copyright issues, subject privacy concerns) where it may not be possible.

JOAD will however only publish data papers for datasets archived with open licenses. Datasets that need to be partially redacted for legal reasons will be considered by the editorial team on a case by case basis.

How do I cite data?

If you use data from a repository that has been released under an open license then you are obliged to cite it (even under a CC0 license). By citing the data paper you also reward the author for sharing their data, as these citations can be tracked as for any scholarly paper (unfortunately there is no system for tracking the data citations themselves yet, which is another reason that a data paper is so useful). You should therefore include a reference to the data paper describing the data, followed by a reference to the data in the repository itself. In order for this to work it is essential that the citations are in the references section of the article and include the DOIs (or any other identifier the repository might use), e.g.:

References

Bevan, A. and Conolly, J. (2012) Intensive Survey Data from Antikythera, Greece. Journal of Open Archaeology Data 1(1), DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/4f3bcb3f7f21d

Bevan, A. and Conolly, J. (2012) The Antikythera Survey Project [data-set]. York: Archaeology Data Service [distributor] (http://dx.doi.org/10.5284/1012484)

Do I have to pay to publish in this journal?

Articles accepted for publication will be asked to pay an Article Publication Charge (APC) to cover publication costs. This can normally be sourced from your funder or institution. This fee covers all publication costs (editorial processes; web hosting; indexing; marketing; archiving; DOI registration etc) and ensures that all of the content is fully open access. It also includes a waiver fee that goes toward our waiver fund, so all authors can publish regardless of ability to pay. This approach maximises the potential readership of publications and allows the journal to be run in a sustainable way.

Many institutions have funds available to support open access publications by their staff, therefore we ask that you contact the relevant body to cover the APC.

If you do not know about your institution’s policy on open access funding, please contact your departmental/faculty administrators and institution library, as funds may be available to you.

If published, you will receive an APC request email from us, along with information on how payment can be arranged.

If you need to request an APC waiver, please outline this in your cover letter.

Tax will be added to all fees charged, when applicable (includes VAT/Sales tax or any other applicable taxes).

Annotation and post-publication comment

The journal platform permits readers to leave comments and in-browser annotations via hypothes.is. Readers will require a hypothes.is account to create annotations, and will have the option to make these public or private. Comments may be moderated by the journal, however, if they are non-offensive and relevant to the publication subject, comments will remain online without edit.

Advertisement Policy

The journal only displays advertisements that are of relevance to its scope and will be of interest to the readership (e.g. upcoming conferences). All advertising space is provided free of charge and the editor and publisher have the right to decline or withdraw adverts at any point. Adverts will include a text heading to make it clear that they are adverts not related to the journal.

If you wish to propose a potential advert then please contact the editorial team. All advert images will have to be provided to the publisher.

Collaborations

If your data paper relates to digital applications to archaeology, including, but not restricted to, 3D modelling, spatial analysis, remote sensing, geophysics, field recording techniques, databases, semantic web, statistics, data mining, simulation modelling, network analysis and digital reconstructions of the past, consider submitting a full research paper to the Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology.

Journal Ownership

Ownership of the Journal title and all associated branding and intellectual property is held by Ubiquity Press. The journal website design and associated technical infrastructure to host the journal is retained by Ubiquity Press Ltd.

Journal of Open Archaeology Data