Stefan Krmnicek and Peter Probst (*)

(Photo by alcomm, 2006. Creative Commons License. http://www.flickr.com/photos/alcomm/217097889/)
Since March 2006 the online-journal Frankfurter elektronische Rundschau zur Altertumskunde (Frankfurt electronic Review of Antiquity) or FeRA has been accessible here. Now in its tenth issue and fourth year, the time seems right for the editors to summarize their experiences on publishing an online journal in Classical Studies (philology, history, archaeology) in order to contribute to general observations on electronic publication in the humanities (Leiß 2006; Koch et al. 2009).

The FeRA project is meant to offer an online forum for young scholars from universities all over the world to present the results of their research. The majority of journals available online in 2006 were digital versions of the traditional print periodicals and most were not accessible free of charge. There were only a few journals in classical studies that appeared solely in digital form (e.g. Leeds International Classical Studies; on the intention of this journal Heath 2002; with a similar concept of publishing Göttinger Forum für Altertumswissenschaft). In contrast, online-journals for reviews are more numerous and many have become well-established (e.g. Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Plekos or Scholia Reviews); moreover, most online-journals are only concerned with specialized subjects (e.g. Didaskalia. Ancient Journal Today; an exception is Forum Archaeologiae. Zeitschrift für klassische Archäologie). Apart from some exceptions in Great Britain (Digressus. The Internet Journal for the Classical World and Rosetta. Papers of the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity at the University of Birmingham), there were few freely accessible journals on classical subjects that enabled promising young scholars to publish papers on a wide range of topics. In contrast with other online journals that appeared once per year or irregularly, FeRA was planned with three issues per annum in order to promote faster communication of research projects. Thus, FeRA combined select characteristics of existing online journals in its own unique way (e.g. written for and by young scholars and junior academics, embracing a broad thematic scope and freely accessible).
So far ten issues have appeared with 36 contributions (21 articles, 15 reviews) encompassing a wide spectrum of topics in the field. The articles in German, English and Italian range from studies of material culture to philological and historical examination of written sources. There has been no noticeable concentration on particular epochs or regions of the ancient world. The contributors have been almost exclusively younger scholars working on their doctoral theses (or shortly after completion). Thus the initial goals of the journal have been met.
Following the first issue in March 2006, the journal was accessed almost 10,500 times in the first nine months after its inception. By the end of 2009 the FeRA website had been accessed more than 100,000 times, indicating increasing popularity and more widespread acceptance. In view of the subject areas covered by the journal, it might be presumed that its readers are to be found in the various disciplines of Classical Studies and related subjects (e.g. history, library science, human geography, etc.). Log file analysis of visits to the website from March 2006 to December 2009, however, presents a more differentiated picture of users’ backgrounds than initially supposed. Within the framework of this analysis, the IP-addresses were examined according to keywords like “uni”, “museum”, “ac.uk”, “edu” etc. This allowed us to identify the proportion of all visits which came from university, research institution, and library networks. The results showed that only about 14% of visits originated from academic networks. Since only a few of the IP-addresses could be allocated to a particular subject via components such as “alt-gesch”, “klassarch”, “phil”, “class”, “arch” etc., a further breakdown according to field of study could not be undertaken.
This analysis leads to the conclusion that the majority of visits were initiated from IP-addresses of private internet providers. These, of course, provide no insight as to whether the users have any relation to the subject matter – i.e. whether they are scholars or students who receive scientific texts via their own internet access. It is interesting to note that with respect to the individual time zones in Europe and North America, FeRA is accessed mostly in the daytime by university servers but chiefly outside of regular working hours via private servers. However, the fact that the journal is also accessed by private internet servers during regular working hours as well as by users from unrelated disciplines (with IP-addresses from the areas of medicine, administration, and private companies), taken together with references to FeRA articles in discussion groups serving the interested layperson, might suggest a wide-ranging readership consisting of more than just experts in the field. At present it is still unclear how visits to online journals on Ancient Studies from countries in South America or South and East Asia without a comprehensive tradition in European classical studies should be interpreted (Ober et al. 2007, 232-233). Although the proportion of lay readers cannot be exactly quantified, it is nevertheless noteworthy that a fairly large group of people interested in the very specialized field of classical studies exists outside of academia. Along these lines the results of the log file analysis for FeRA mirror those of other comparable publications in the field (Pritchard 2008, 7-8). This fulfills the declared objective and fundamental tenet of the open access movement (see http://open-access.net/ [accessed 10/01/2010] for the national German information platform for open access to scholarly information), namely to allow free access to information and knowledge to everyone fascinated by antiquity and not only to select elites in academia.
On the other hand, the number of manuscripts handed in by young and upcoming scholars in the field was less than expected. In addition, the emphasis in submissions over the last two years has shifted from articles and papers to reviews. The reasons why junior academics in general have come to prefer publishing shorter reviews, rather than more extensive papers, may be found in the present situation in the humanities. Doctoral candidates and recent graduates have been increasingly swamped with time-consuming obligations: expanded teaching loads, the need to obtain key qualifications while working on their theses, and the added pressure to achieve a fast and goal-oriented completion of the dissertation due to a rescinding of stipends and grants. In the field of classical studies, as in the humanities in general, there is no marked inclination yet to publish in electronic media. Recent studies ordered by the German Research Foundation (DFG) examined attitudes to publication in science and research, especially with respect to open access media. They showed that electronically published journals were quite well-known and frequently used. At the same time they pointed out a certain reluctance to publish articles and papers in open access journals, especially in the humanities (German Research Foundation 2005; Hess et al. 2007; Koch et al. 2009). As a result, although FeRA is an electronic journal connected to a university (incl. ISSN) with the same standards employed by traditional periodicals in print (i.e. numbering by year, volume and page, peer review system with its own advisory board; cf. Samida 2006, 1012-1014), it is not surprising that in the framework of current conditions junior academics calculate their time carefully and prefer – if they publish at all before their doctoral theses – to make the results of their research public in established print media. Thus online journals are primarily used to publish reviews and short articles. Even the acceptance of contributions from all subjects and from several languages for publication (German, English and Italian in the case of this journal) prompts no noticeable change and coheres with a general trend in the humanities (Carver 2007, 142-146). The challenges the FeRA project faces are therefore not an isolated phenomenon: a recent study confirms the growing trend that young academics in the Anglo-Saxon world tend not to publish the results of their research in online-journals (Salt 2007, 85).
In conclusion, despite the difficulties mentioned above, the project to set up a free and accessible online journal organized by and for young scholars and encompassing all facets of classical studies has been relatively successful. Thanks to free online access the articles published in this periodical have found widespread recognition both within the field and outside of it. The reception of transmitted information, substantiated by references in print-media, can also be summed up as positive. It is, however, regrettable that – due to the circumstances mentioned above – it is precisely the younger generation of classical scholars who do not fully profit from the use of online publication, even though experience shows clearly that research published online reaches a wider public much faster than do publications in traditional print media. That the scientific community is increasingly convinced of the advantages of electronic publication can be deduced from the number of newly established online periodicals (e.g. The Journal of Archaeology in the Low Countries established in May 2009) (1). A journal specifically tailored to junior academics, published three times a year, open to articles written in multiple languages, with its own ISSN number – as is the case with the FeRA journal – is unique.
Notes
(*) Many thanks to Matt Edgeworth for his generous help and his stylistic suggestions.
(1) An excellent survey of all online-periodicals (although without distinguishing those paralleling traditional print versions) is found in Charles Jones’ (New York University) blog AWOL – The Ancient World Online.
http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.com/2009/10/alphabetical-list-of-open-access.html (accessed 10/01/2010)
References
Carver, M. 2007. Archaeology Journals, Academics and Open Access. European Journal of Archaeology, 10, 135-148.
German Research Foundation 2005. Publikationsstrategien im Wandel? Ergebnisse einer Umfrage zum Publikations- und Rezeptionsverhalten unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Open Access.
http://www.dfg.de/download/pdf/dfg_im_profil/evaluation_statistik/programm_evaluation/
studie_publikationsstrategien_bericht_dt.pdf (accessed 14/04/2010)
Heath, M. 2002. Editorial introduction. Leeds International Classical Studies, 1.0, 1-8.
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/classics/lics/2002/200200.pdf (accessed 10/01/2010)
Hess, T., R. Wigand, F. Mann, and B. von Walter 2007. Open access and science publishing, Management Report, 1, 1-17.
http://openaccess-study.com/Hess_Wigand_Mann_Walter_2007_Open_Access_Management_Report.pdf (accessed 14/04/2010)
Koch, L., G. Mey and K. Mruck 2009. Erfahrungen mit Open Access – ausgewählte Ergebnisse
aus der Befragung zu Nutzen und Nutzung von „Forum Qualitative Forschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research“ (FQS). Information, Wissenschaft & Praxis, 60(5), 291-299.
Leiß, C. 2006. Elektronisches Publizieren im wissenschaftlichen Alltag. Überlegungen zur Integration elektronischer Publikationsformen in die Geisteswissenschaften. Bibliotheksdienst, 40, 988-993.
Ober, J., B. D. Shaw, W. Scheidel and D. Sanclemente 2007. Toward Open Access in Ancient Studies. The Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics. Hesperia, 76, 229-242.
Pritchard, D. 2008. Working Papers, Open Access, and Cyber-infrastructure in Classical Studies. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 23, 149-162.
Salt, A. 2007. Electric strata: Assemblage and changes in postgraduate publication on the internet. European Journal of Archaeology, 10, 83-85.
Samida, St. 2006. Elektronische Zeitschriften in der Ur- und Frühgeschichtlichen Archäologie: Bestandsaufnahme und Analyse. Bibliotheksdienst, 40, 1003-1014.
Websites referenced
Frankfurter elektronische Rundschau zur Altertumskunde
http://www.fera-journal.eu/ (accessed 14/04/2010)
Leeds International Classical Studies
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/classics/lics/index.html (accessed 10/01/2010)
Göttinger Forum für Altertumswissenschaft
http://gfa.gbv.de/z/pages (accessed 10/01/2010)
Bryn Mawr Classical Review
http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/ (accessed 10/01/2010)
Plekos
http://www.plekos.uni-muenchen.de/startseite.html (accessed 10/01/2010)
Scholia Reviews
http://www.classics.ukzn.ac.za/reviews/ (accessed 12/05/2010)
Didaskalia. Ancient Journal Today
http://www.didaskalia.net/ (accessed 10/01/2010)
Forum Archaeologiae. Zeitschrift für klassische Archäologie
http://farch.net/ (accessed 10/01/2010)
Digressus. The Internet Journal for the Classical World
http://www.digressus.org/ (accessed 10/01/2010)
Rosetta. Papers of the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity at the University of Birmingham
http://www.rosetta.bham.ac.uk/ (accessed 10/01/2010)
The Journal of Archaeology in the Low Countries
http://www.jalc.nl/ (accessed 10/01/2010)