open access | downwithtime -- Open Quaternary

"Open Quaternary is a new, fully open access journal dedicated to the Quaternary Sciences, published by Ubiquity Press (the Call for Papers is below) with very low publishing costs (£250, about $425USD).  The journal will cover a number of related disciplines, focusing on the Quaternary, including almost anything you can put 'paleo' in front of (climate, botany, ecology), geomorphology, palynology, vertebrate and invertebrate palaeontology, zooarchaeology, geoarchaeology, biological anthropology and Palaeolithic archaeology. All papers are licensed under Creative Commons CC by 3.0 license and Open Quaternary actively encourages pre-publication of submissions 'as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work'. I was lucky enough to be invited to join the Editorial Board by the excellent team of Editors in Chief, Matthew Law (Bath Spa University), Suzanne Pilaar Birch (Brown University), and Victoria Herridge (Natural History Museum, UK). The Editorial board looks great too. A very diverse group of researchers, with a broad range of expertise and career stages represented. Another nice aspect of the journal is the institution of double blind review. Emily Darling recently published an article in Conservation Biology supporting double blind review. She shows that journals with double blind reviews appear to have higher rates of publication for female lead authors and leverages recent work by Moss-Racusin et al. (2012) showing subtle, but distinct bias by academics against “Jennifer”s in academia . Encouraging diversity is a worthwhile goal for those of us in academia, and since publications remain a key metric for advancement, changes that encourage equality across gender and background should be supported. Until broader metrics of academic advancement are accepted (Goring et al., 2014) we need to support efforts to reduce advantages gained solely on the basis of sex or background ..."