Getting published on Open Access the economical way

“Often research project funders require researchers make available their project results, data as well as publications, on the internet on Open Access (OA). One option then is to use some of the project funding to pay a commercial publisher for OA, but such expense is not necessary for the sake only of OA. Even though the choice of a particular publisher may be driven by other considerations, such as journal impact or prestige, it can sometimes be more economical to get the results published without incurring in a publisher’s OA fee. This option entails getting published not on OA in a commercial journal and, at the same time, archiving or depositing the results in some pre-print form in an OA repository, if researchers can choose a publisher that agrees to them archiving pre-prints on OA. For the Social Sciences there is the well-established SSRN [1] which can be regarded as a subject specific OA repository.  For Physics, Complexity, Computing and nearby disciplines an immediate choice is probably the arxViv [2] repository. For Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology, however, the landscape of OA subject specific repositories is not yet quite as consolidated as in the Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) subject areas. Nevertheless, the SSRN does have networks for Anthropology and Archaeology respectively. In addition, a number of ‘institutional repositories’ are available to researchers from any institution.  The HAL [3] repository, for instance, has specific sections for ‘Archaeology and Prehistory’, and for ‘Social Anthropology and Ethnology’”.