Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, chairman of the Swedish Skeptics Society, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, and father of two.
Since a bit more than a year, Fornvännen's first 100 years (1906-2005) have been freely available and searchable on-line. It's a quarterly multi-language research journal mainly about Scandinavian archaeology and Medieval art, and I'm proud to be its managing editor. Now we've gone one step further and made the thing into an Open Access journal. The site's run of the journal is complete up to 6 months ago, and every issue will henceforth appear on-line half a year after it was distributed on paper. Here, for instance, is an excellent paper in English by my buddy Svante Fischer from last summer's issue, about the implications of two Scandinavian gold pendants of the Migration Period found in Serbia.
Many thanks to my friends Gun Larsson and Kerstin Assarsson-Rizzi of the Library of the Academy of Letters who have been the driving forces behind our on-line move!
Humanities & Social Science
Comments
This is great...any chance the "In English" link on the page could be fixed? Currently it gives a Forbidden page. I hope this is the start of other journals moving to open access.
Posted by: supes | March 18, 2009 9:29 AM
Gun tells me (and this sounds really funny in Swedish) that she's been "having kittens" over that bug for weeks.
Posted by: Martin R | March 18, 2009 12:05 PM
Pictures and additional background on the Udovice solidi are available in another Fornvännen article from 2008: http://fornvannen.se/pdf/2000talet/2008_073.pdf
Posted by: Tobias | March 18, 2009 12:59 PM
Out of curiosity, do you have any favorites in there?
I found a couple of interesting articles that fit what I enjoy reading about, but I'm curious if there are any articles you consider particularly worthwhile, or good jumping-off points for getting into particular areas of interest.
Posted by: rsm | March 21, 2009 3:45 AM
Kind of depends on whether you know Scandy or not. Though there's always an English abstract, the body of the papers is rarely in English. Two of my favourites in Swedish is Mats P. Malmer's 1984 theory paper "Arkeologisk positivism" and Peter Tångeberg's "Madonnaskulpturen i Stora Malms kyrka" (2007) about continually updated Medieval madonna statues.
Posted by: Martin R | March 21, 2009 4:02 AM
My Swedish is so-so, comprehension is at about 85-90% as long as no one starts talking about ice cream, then I just get confused. In other words: I should manage if it's interesting.
Posted by: rsm | March 21, 2009 7:16 PM
Sounds like my German. I can talk about stuff you find in 1st Millennium graves, but don't ask me to order a pizza...
Posted by: Martin R | March 22, 2009 3:48 AM