UA News

The Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections, an electronic peer-reviewed journal, has been created out of a collaboration with UA faculty and the UA Libraries.

The University of Arizona Libraries and Regents' Professor Richard Wilkinson have jointly released a new electronic journal.

The Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections, or the JAEI, was created by Wilkinson, a UA classics and Near Eastern studies professor, and will be hosted on the UA Libraries' institutional repository site, also known as UAiR.

The digitially-based, peer-reviewed journal explores the relationship between ancient Egypt and its surrounding regions and helps develop an important new trend in Egyptological scholarship by taking an interdisciplinary approach.

The journal publishes full-length articles, which have been subjected to the same peer-reviewed, blind screening process used by traditional scholarly print journals. The JAEI will also include short research notes, reviews of published works, announcements and reports of relevant conferences and symposia.

The journal also examines the relationship between ancient Egypt and its neighbors through different lenses, ranging from history to technology to art and religion.

"This is going to be a very timely and important journal for this field, there is no doubt about it," Wilkinson said in a statement.

Interest in subscribing to the journal has already been widespread.

The journal counts Oxford and Harvard universities among its initial subscribers and subscriptions have already been received from a number of countries. Interest has also been high among scholars wanting to contribute to the journal.

One of the great strengths of the JAEI as an e-publication is its ability to disseminate scholarship swiftly. It is not unusual in the field of Egyptology to see the publication cycle in traditional print publications take two to five years, Wilkinson said.

In addition to its more immediate nature, JAEI's format makes it more accessible around the world, he added. "I see this as the way to do things in the future," Wilkinson said.

The next issue of the JAEI will be available at the UAiR site at the end of March.

More university research libraries across the country are partnering with faculty to publish these types of niche scholarship products which might be financially impossible to start up as traditional print products, said Atifa Rawan, a UA Research Support Services Team librarian.

As a project, the JAEI is as important for the library as it is for Egyptology, Rawan said.

"Libraries are very logical places for promoting these journals, because libraries have the trust of the faculty," said Rawan, who also serves on the journal's production board. "This is a journal that really pushes us to look more at e-commerce, pushes us to learn."