Unearthing a small archaeological report series
Abstract
Archaeological reports can be quite invisible in the scholarly infrastructure, as they often constitute what is referred to as “grey literature”. Grey literature is usually not extensively covered by bibliographic indexes. When published at an institutional platform, grey series are also often overlooked by the support staff, who due to capacity challenges have to prioritize the technical development of peer-reviewed series in their portfolios. Though non-peer reviewed, archaeological reports are an important contribution to the body of knowledge, as they contain unique data about archaeological surveys.This poster presents a “visibility” project for a small diamond open access archaeological report series, Tromura, that is published by the university museum at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Tromura is an old report series, that started publishing on UiT’s Open Journal Systems platform in 2022. As of June 2025, the series is quite invisible in the wider scholarly infrastructure. The visibility project starts in the summer of 2025 and focuses on the improvement of the series’ metadata and indexing, in cooperation with the series’ editorial team. Along with best practices for key metadata, the project also looks at the possibility for better coverage of funder information. Almost all of the series’ reports have external funding, as archaeological surveys in Norway are funded according to the “polluter pays” principle. Most of the funders, however, are either small organizations or municipalities that do not have persistent funder IDs. The project will contain an element where the report series team contribute to the visibility of these small funders through ROR registration and advocacy.