We provide Open Access services for peer-reviewed monographs, site reports, conference proceedings and edited collections. Our editorial staff will be pleased to talk to you about your requirements. The information contained in this section of the website refers to ‘Gold’ Open Access. For more information about our editorial policies and process, please refer to our Editorial Guidelines and contact the editorial team if you have any questions.

To browse our Open Access books view our current collection.

Submitting a proposal

Our editorial team will be delighted to receive your proposal. The submission procedure is as follows:

• Contact our editorial team for an initial discussion and/or download and complete a new proposal submission form
• Email the form, together with any supporting material, e.g., your CV and draft material, to our editorial team

We will keep you informed of the progress of your submission at each stage of the consideration process.

Open Access licence agreement

We publish our OA content under a Creative Commons licence. Creative Commons licences allow authors to retain copyright in their work, while allowing others to distribute, copy and make certain uses of their work.

The standard licence agreement we use for OA publications is the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

Most research funders requiring OA will accept this licence, but if you would like to use a different licence which permits a greater degree of flexibility, please discuss this with your editor when you submit a proposal.

Publication process

The publication process and production timeframe for OA can be as short as 3 months. Once your final manuscript is in-house, your dedicated editor and production manager based in our UK office will oversee the process, including manuscript copyediting, text and cover design, typesetting and proofreading. 

An overview of the publishing process:

1.   Submission: Once you’ve submitted your book proposal and all supporting material to our editorial team,
       our editor will contact you to discuss and provide a provisional quote for OA.

2.   Peer review: Your editor will send your proposal and accompanying material to qualified scholars in your
       field of research for peer review.

3.   Author response: When the review is complete, your editor will send the reviewers’ feedback to you and invite
       a formal response from you.

4.   Committee approval: With the original proposal, sample material, review and response in hand, your editor will
       present the book to our publishing committee for approval to publish and finalise an OA quote.

5.   Contract and fee transaction: You will receive a contract stating the agreed-upon delivery date for your final
       manuscript. After you have signed the contract, your editor will send you more information about preparing your
       work for publication and our Author Guidelines. At this point, the agreed OA fee will also be invoiced.

6.   Production: You will deliver your final manuscript along with supplementary forms and evidence that all
       necessary permissions have been secured. Your book will then be copyedited, typeset, proofread and bound.

7.   Publication: Your book is made publicly available and freely accessible worldwide. It will also be available in
       print format.

8.   After publication: We will work closely with you to market your book as widely and effectively as possible.

Peer Review

We operate a single-blind peer review process, using a combination of author-recommended and independently contacted subject specialists. Authors will not know who has been chosen to provide peer review, but reviewers know the identity of authors and can waive their right to anonymity if desired. Each manuscript is reviewed by between 2 and 4 reviewers, and the decision on including author-recommended reviewers is at the discretion of the handling editor. For publications in a sub-series, the series editors will be contacted to recommend appropriate reviewers, and members of the sub-series editorial board will also be considered as reviewers.

Once peer reviews have been received, these will be sent to the author in the form of a review summary. Authors will then be invited to read and respond to these reviews, and their responses will be considered by the publishing committee when deciding whether to contract the project. If a manuscript is deemed by peer reviewers not to meet our editorial standards or does not appear a good fit for the BAR series, it will be rejected by the editorial committee. Where appropriate, elements of the author responses may be forwarded back to the original reviewers, for example if the author has requested further clarification on their comments. The anonymity of the reviewer will be maintained throughout this process.

All reviewers are asked to confirm that they have no conflict of interest before accepting the role as a peer reviewer. If any misconduct is alleged or suspected, peer review will be paused while we investigate. In such cases, COPE guidelines will be followed to ensure best practice in resolving the issue. We take any allegations of misconduct – whether pre- or post-publication – extremely seriously, and we expect all reviewers to act in accordance with the COPE guidelines on ethical peer-review. Where a review is identified as biased, it will not be considered by the publishing committee while they are deciding whether to contract the project.

Dissemination

Your OA content will be available for free download on the BAR Digital platform, and on online repositories
such as Google Scholar/Google Books, DOAB and OAPEN. It is also automatically accessible as part of the
BAR Digital Collection, and the URL is deposited in the Crossref DOI repository, allowing citation-linking to the work.

Marketing

Most OA books will be part of the BAR Series, the largest series of academic archaeology in the world,
and so will benefit from our sales and marketing reach, built up over 45 years of publishing for the archaeology community.
Our marketing team will work with you closely to ensure your book reaches the widest possible audience.
We promote your book to our network of libraries, institutional customers, and sales agents worldwide. You can expect tailored
marketing activity in the form of email campaigns, social media, and representation at conferences worldwide.

Preservation

In addition to dissemination through multiple e-book channels, the OA book will be archived with Clockss to
ensure future preservation and access.

Open Access fees – immediate 'Gold' OA

Please note that the prices listed below serve as guidelines only. The price for an OA book is determined for each title
individually, based on the number of pages, number of images and expected production costs.

• Up to 200,000 words £6,500
• Up to 300,000 words £8,000

Please ask our editorial team for an estimate for larger books or edited collections.

Obtaining permissions for third-party materials used in your book

It may be more difficult or more expensive to obtain permission to reuse materials (including your own writing
published by third parties) in an Open Access book that will be freely available online. When you obtain
permissions, you must ensure that you explicitly state that they are being sought for an Open Access publication.