Scholarly Journals Anthology

Last week an anthology I've edited was delivered from the printers.

Scholarly Journals Between the Past and the Future. The Fornvännen Centenary Round-Table Seminar. Stockholm, 21 April 2006. Kungliga Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, Konferenser 65. Stockholm 2007. 109 pp. ISBN 978-91-7402-368-8.

On 21 April 2006 a round-table seminar took place on the premises of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities in Stockholm. The occasion was Fornvännen's centenary, and the theme was the current status and future prospects of such scholarly journals.

This volume collects nine papers by participants in the seminar. They include the editors-in-chief of Acta Archaeologica (Copenhagen), Antiquity (York), Archaeologia Polona (Warsaw), Finskt Museum (Helsinki), Kuml (Aarhus) and the defunct Meddelanden från Lunds universitets historiska museum (Lund). Other contributions are made by representatives for the National Library in Stockholm, the Library of the Academy of Letters in Stockholm and the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin.

Main themes are the step from paper to on-line publishing, how to solve funding problems and the best way to ensure continued high academic standards.

I learned a lot from Jan Hagerlid's excellent paper on e-repositories and Open Access journals. Did you know that in the future, your department will most likely pay a journal a sum of money if it accepts one of your manuscripts, and people will then get to read the published paper for free? My advice is, don't buy stock in commercial journal publishing companies.