Hesperia Provides Open Access to More than 1,500 Articles

“The American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) continues its strong commitment to open scholarship by providing easy, free access to past issues of Hesperia. The quarterly joins nearly 1,200 other international open access journals in ancient studies as listed in The Ancient World Online. As of July 11th, over 1,500Hesperia articles (1932 to 2009) are available as downloadable PDFs on the ASCSA’s website. Through a content-sharing agreement negotiated between the ASCSA and JSTOR, the online host of the journal, all articles beyond the three-year ‘moving wall’ can be freely distributed on the School’s website for individual use. This initiative was unanimously endorsed by the Publications Committee of the School’s Managing Committee. ‘Making Hesperia open access helps the journal fulfill the ASCSA’s mission of providing resources for scholarly work, and disseminating research,’ Andrew Reinhard, the ASCSA’s Director of Publications, said. ‘We’re providing information on the history and archaeology of the Greek world to as wide an audience as possible. Our content is more readily available to anyone who wants to use it ... ’ The webpage is intended primarily for the use of individuals who do not have easy access to JSTOR. Users can find specific articles by using the page’s search box that automatically filters the results. Readers can access an article by clicking on its ‘Download’ link and reading on-screen with PDF software (e.g., Adobe Reader), or they can save the article to a computer, tablet, or other reading device. Online access is not required to read these articles once they have been downloaded, and there is no limit to the number of articles that readers can save for future use. ‘Not everyone has JSTOR access and not everyone has an Internet connection in the field,’ Reinhard said. “Making these articles freely available without requiring an Internet connection or even a subscription should help people have the information they need on whatever device they’re using in the trench, camp, and excavation house...’ The articles on the open access page are free of digital rights management (DRM), but are protected under the Creative Commons BY-NC license that allows for downloading and sharing articles, and require that the ASCSA and Hesperia be credited as the source. The articles cannot be used for commercial purposes.”