About the Journal

Asia Anteriore Antica. Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures

Asia Anteriore Antica (AsiAnA) is an international Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures studies founded and edited by scholars of different disciplines and approaches (philology, linguistics, history, archaeology), and cooperating in common researches and field projects based on an interdisciplinary perspective. 

FOCUS

Asia Anteriore Antica (AsiAnA) focuses on the variegated scenario of the emergence, development and crises of the ancient Near East cultures analysed in the plurality of their distinct and intertwining characters, languages, writing and literacy, administration and material culture, arts and politics, economy and trade, ideology and religion. All these lements shaped a civilization which strongly impacted on the history of the ancient world.  Exploring this plurality of issues from different perspectives can add to our understanding of the social dynamics and the spatial and chronological trajectories that forged the Near Eastern cultures over a long duration. 

AIM

Asia Anteriore Antica (AsiAnA) will present studies in different disciplines, Hittitology, Assyriology, Semitistics, History, Archaeology and Art History of the ancient Near East aiming to diffuse the results of researches such as excavation reports, edition of epigraphic sources, studies on philological data, visual arts, archaeology and archaeometry. With the intent of confronting different scientific voices of these disciplines and crossing their traditional borders the journal will supply a handy tool of scholarly information on various subjects, open to the international debate and innovative theoretical issues.

RIGOROUS DOUBLE BLIND PEER REVIEW

Each submission to AsiAnA  is subject to a rigorous quality control and peer-review evaluation process before receiving a decision. The initial in-house quality control check deals with issues such as competing interests; ethical requirements for studies involving human participants or animals; financial disclosures; full compliance with AsiAnA’s data availability policy, etc. 
Submissions may be returned to authors for queries, and will not be seen by our Editorial Board or peer reviewers until they pass this quality control check. The Editor-in-Chief is responsible for conducting the peer-review process and for the final decision on the submitted article. 

OPEN ACCESS POLICY

AsiAnA  provides immediate open access to its content. Our publisher, Firenze University Press at the University of Florence, complies with the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition of Open Access: By “open access” , we mean the free availability on the public internet, the permission for all users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full text of the articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain is to guarantee the original authors with control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited. We support a greater global exchange of knowledge by making the research published in our journal open to the public and reusable under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY-4.0). Furthermore, we encourage authors to post their pre-publication manuscript in institutional repositories or on their websites prior to and during the submission process and to post the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version after publication without embargo. These practices benefit authors with productive exchanges as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.

PUBLICATION FREQUENCY

Papers will be published online one time per year. Manuscripts are accepted at any time through the online submission system. 

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

Authors who publish with AsiAnA  agree to the following terms:

  • Authors retain the copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY-4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in AsiAnA.
  • Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.
  • Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

PUBLICATION FEES

Unlike many open-access journals, AsiAnA  does not charge any publication fee.

WAIVER INFORMATION

Fee waivers do not apply at Firenze University Press because our funding does not rely on author charges. 

PUBLICATION ETHICS

Responsibilities of AsiAnA's editors, reviewers, and authors concerning publication ethics and publication malpractice are described in Asiana’s Guidelines on Publication Ethics.   

CORRECTIONS AND RETRACTIONS

In accordance with the generally accepted standards of scholarly publishing, AsiAnA does not alter articles after publication: "Articles that have been published should remain extant, exact and unaltered to the maximum extent possible".
In cases of serious errors or (suspected) misconduct AsiAnA  publishes corrections and retractions (expressions of concern).

Corrections
In cases of serious errors that affect or significantly impair the reader’s understanding or evaluation of the article, AsiAnA publishes a correction note that is linked to the published article. The published article will be left unchanged.
Retractions 
In accordance with the "Retraction Guidelines" by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) AsiAnA will retract a published article if 
  • there is clear evidence that the findings are unreliable, either as a result of misconduct (e.g. data fabrication) or honest error (e.g. miscalculation)
  • the findings have previously been published elsewhere without proper crossreferencing, permission or justification (i.e. cases of redundant publication)
  • it turns out to be an act of plagiarism
  • it reports unethical research.
An article is retracted by publishing a retraction notice that is linked to or replaces the retracted article. AsiAnA will make any effort to clearly identify a retracted article as such.
If an investigation is underway that might result in the retraction of an article AsiAnA may choose to alert readers by publishing an expression of concern.

ARCHIVING

AsiAnA and Firenze University Press are experimenting a National legal deposition and long-term digital preservation service.