This journal is committed to the Open Science policies declared by UNESCO, understood as "a set of guidelines, standards, regulations, laws, principles, or orientations for putting the values and principles of open science into practice. Open science policies are crucial for fostering a culture of open science and developing science, technology, and innovation systems that contribute to making research more efficient, reliable, impactful, inclusive, and responsive to the needs of society."
Understood in this way, the journal's editorial team will ensure the definition of strategies aimed at promoting these principles and implement good practices in open science, taking into account:
Licenses of use all published content will be available under a Creative Commons CC-BY-4.0 license, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that appropriate credit is given to the authors and the journal.
Data Deposit. Authors must deposit the data underlying their research in recognized open access repositories and provide a corresponding link in the manuscript. Use of repositories such as Zenodo, Dryad, and Figshare is recommended (see data policy).
Relationship with Supplementary Materials. Supplementary materials (such as codes, graphs, extended tables, among others) must be accessible through open repositories and linked in the published articles. The use of persistent identifiers (DOIs or others) will be encouraged to facilitate citation and retrieval.
Version Policy. Authors are allowed to disseminate electronically (e.g. in institutional repositories or on their own websites) the published version of their manuscripts, as this favours circulation and early diffusion and thus possibly increases the citations and scope among the academic community.
Transparency in Peer Review. The journal will not implement an open peer review system. The evaluation process will remain anonymous (double-blind) to ensure the integrity and quality of the editorial process, but the lists of reviewers will be published.
Metadata Transfer Protocol. The metadata of articles published in Virtual Archaeology Review (VAR) will be structured according to interoperable standards (Dublin Core, OAI-PMH) and will be available for collection by repositories and indexing systems.
