FROM THE EDITOR

From the Editor

Access, discoverability, and paying the bills are key concerns in running any journal. In our first issue of this year, we announced that we would publish Historia under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial designation, but on further reflection, we are opting for a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0). This maximizes the options for disseminating your published work. Importantly, copyright stays with the author, and anyone using the material must give 'appropriate credit, a link to the licence, and indicate if changes were made'. For more information, see: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. This licence allows the Historical Association of South Africa (HASA), which owns Historia, to make the journal searchable on the major database, Sabinet. Our Open Access platforms, SciELO and the University of Pretoria Open Journals portal make the articles free to read and download. HASA also distributes print copies of Historia to subscribing libraries and to HASA subscribers.

Unfortunately, all of this does not come without some financial cost, though the work of the editorial team is entirely without reimbursement, bar minimal stipends paid by HASA to the coordinating editor and our copy editor. We close this year with the reluctant announcement that Historia's page fees for authors have increased to R200 per ordinary page and R250 per colour page. These costs (barely) cover the printing and postage of two issues per annum but are in most instances met by the tertiary institutions to which South African-based authors are affiliated. In addition, the Open Access model of publishing is gaining momentum internationally and across the region, with more universities providing dedicated funds to authors of scholarly works published in Open Access journals.

HASA's next Biennial Conference is to be hosted by Rhodes University in Makhanda (Grahamstown) 27-29 June 2023. The theme is 'History: New Turns, Fresh Directions and Alternative Avenues', and members of the Historia team will be there. For the Call for Papers, go to https://hgsa.co.za/hasa2023/. We welcome proposals for themed issues of Historia arising from conference panels.

We are delighted to announce that Associate Professor Nyamunda of the University of Pretoria's Department of Historical and Heritage Studies has joined Historia's editorial team and will be responsible for our Perspectives Forum.

Over the course of the next year, Historia will be moving our article submission facility to the University of Pretoria's journal management platform and decommissioning our Gmail account. We will guide you through this system as soon as we are confident it will work well for us all. In the meanwhile, you may wish to sign up here: https://upjournals.up.ac.7a/index.php/historia/about/submissions.