BASOR’S NEW INITIATIVE
Publication Online and in Hardcopy
We are pleased to announce that digital versions of the first three articles from the forthcoming BASOR 373 issue (May 2015) are now available to individual BASOR subscribers (and those whose institutions have subscriptions) via the JSTOR Current Scholarship Program:
Andreas Hauptmann, Sigrid Schmitt-Strecker, Thomas E. Levy, and Friedrich Begemann, “On Early Bronze Age Copper Bar Ingots from the Southern Levant” (pp. 1-24)
Alexander Fantalkin, Israel Finkelstein, and Eli Piasetzky, “Late Helladic to Middle Geometric Aegean
and Contemporary Cypriot Chronologies: A Radiocarbon View from the Levant” (pp. 25-48)
George Bevan, Greg Fisher, and Denis Genequand, “The Late Antique Church at Tall al-ʿUmayrī East: New Evidence for the Jafnid Family and the Cult of St. Sergius in Northern Jordan” (pp. 49-68)
In order to access these, please go to BASOR on JSTOR and then click on the “Ahead of Print” link that is located towards the top of the page; it can be seen in the middle of the picture in the following screenshot:
Please note that the second article listed (Fantalkin, Finkelstein, and Piasetzky) has supplementary material accompanying the main article. As listed in the article itself, this supplementary material is not posted on JSTOR but rather can be found here. Future articles with such supplementary materials will also have those materials posted and available at the same location, which is a stable URL.
We anticipate that the next three articles will also be posted within the next ten days to two weeks. A third set of three or more articles may also be posted after that, time permitting. And then all of the articles, plus some book reviews, will be published in hard copy in May. As each set is posted and made available, we will alert all subscribers and ASOR members, via email and other social media. We are absolutely delighted with all of this and we are very grateful to have the full support of BASOR’s editorial board, ASOR’s Publication Committee, and ASOR’s Executive Director.
Henceforth, articles that have been accepted for BASOR will be uploaded to JSTOR after the final set of page proofs for each have passed inspection and been approved. This will usually be done in batches of two, three, four, or even more (in rare cases), depending upon how many articles are ready at that time. This means that BASOR subscribers who have access to JSTOR either individually or through their universities and who wish to see and cite articles prior to the appearance of the print edition will now be able to access digital versions of the articles via the JSTOR Current Scholarship Program several weeks or even months before the arrival of the print edition via postal mail twice per year (in May and November, as per usual). The print edition and the online edition will be identical, including pagination, but the online version will be available first.
As those of you who have published in scholarly journals and edited volumes know, articles can sometimes be ready for publication long before it is time to send out the print edition (i.e., the layout is done, typesetting is done, pagination has been added, page-proofs have been corrected by authors, editors, and assistants, etc.). Thus, articles often end up languishing for a few months, or even years, prior to publication in the print edition. Because of the technology now available, we thought that it is sensible to make articles available online as soon as they are ready for publication, rather than waiting for the issue to be published in hard copy each May and November. This will allow scholars to have their articles appear more rapidly and it also allows for the readership to have earlier access to articles as well.
Individual subscribers to BASOR, and those whose institutions have subscriptions, will have immediate access to the articles via the JSTOR Current Scholarship Program. Those who do not have an individual or institutional subscription to BASOR can still get access to the articles by paying the standard JSTOR fee for each one, though we hope that they or their universities will consider subscribing to BASOR instead. (For those who wish to begin an individual subscription or request that their university do so, the information can be found here.
We wish to reiterate that nothing will change with regard to the “hardcopy edition.” It will still arrive in your postal mail each May and November. It’s just that for those who wish to have earlier access to articles, they will now be able to do so. And again, we would reiterate that the version available online via JSTOR will be absolutely identical in every way to the hardcopy version, including the same page numbers, figure numbers, and so on, so that scholars can begin citing them as soon as they become available.
We are very pleased with all of the articles that we have accepted so far and trust that you will be as well. We are especially grateful to those scholars who entrusted their work to our hands even before they had seen our first issue and would like to thank them for doing so. Along those lines, please allow us to take this opportunity to mention that we are always delighted to consider well-written, carefully documented articles for publication, but we cannot publish your work if you do not submit it to us for consideration, so please think about sending a manuscript our way. BASOR articles can come from a wide range of subjects, ranging from archaeology, art, anthropology, archaeometry, bioarchaeology, and archaeozoology to biblical studies, history, literature, philology, geography, and epigraphy. Our geographical range is also extensive, from Israel and Canaan to ancient Anatolia, Cyprus, Mesopotamia, Iran, Arabia, Egypt, and up into the Caucasus, and our chronological range spans the Paleolithic period through Islamic times. Our goal is to reach a decision (with the assistance of at least two anonymous reviewers in each case) within four weeks of receiving a manuscript and render a verdict of Accept, Reject, or Revise and Resubmit. We will then guide the accepted manuscripts rapidly through the publication pipeline so as to make articles available in a timely fashion to a broad-based readership. In this day and age, we believe that there is no reason for scholarship to languish in a publication pipeline for months at a time and so we would encourage all scholars with interesting ideas, results, and discussions to submit their manuscripts to BASOR via the online submission process at http://www.editorialmanager.com/basor/. At the present time, we are happy to consider submissions for the upcoming November 2015 issue.
Sincerely,
Eric Cline and Christopher Rollston, BASOR Co-Editors
