This afternoon, Chuck Jones alerts us to the re-appearance of the journal Τεκμήρια (ISSN 1106-661x). It is now operating as “a peer reviewed open access journal” under the auspices of the Ινστιτούτο Eλληνικής και Pωμαϊκής Aρχαιότητος (Κ.Ε.Ρ.Α.). Back issues are available on the site (built with the Open Journal Systems publishing system), and in many cases the articles are available in page-scan PDFs and OCR’d PDFs. Information about the reconstituted journal and its submission and review policies are also available. The table of contents for the new issue (vol. 9 = 2008) is worth a look!
My congratulations to the editors and advisers is tempered only by two factors: the discovery that the OCR PDFs seem to employ a custom (non-unicode) font encoding, and a lack of clarity about copyright and license. The non-standard encoding constitutes an unfortunate choice that undermines long-term digital preservation. On the copyright front, the site lacks a clear statement of what the editors and the sponsoring organization mean by “open access”. Though copyright is asserted via a simple statement at the bottom of each web page (“ EKT“), one misses an increasingly standard feature of “open-access” publications: a Creative Commons license (or other) statement indicating what users may (and may not) do with the material presented.
Page 9 of their pdf guide for authors says:
“The copyright for articles in this journal is retained by the author(s), with first
publication rights granted to the journal. By virtue of their appearance in this open
access journal, articles are free to use with proper attribution in educational and other
non-commercial sectors. The National Hellenic Research Foundation retains the right to
publish papers that appear in ΤΕΚΜΗΡΙΑ in any means of electronic publishing and
communication the journal may assume in the future. It also retains the right to deposit
articles published in ΤΕΚΜΗΡΙΑ in its institutional repository.”
which I found by following a few links on their info page.
On the pdf issue, yep, it’s annoying. I registered but no sign of fora or other places to comment besides the email contact.
John: Thanks for finding that information. I still think it would be helpful to have a clear statement of readers’/users’ rights/license directed to them. This is what CC was designed for.