About the Journal

NAMES is one of the world’s leading scholarly journals devoted to the study of onomastics. Since the very first issue in 1952, this scientific quarterly has published cutting-edge, original articles, notes, and book reviews that investigate the derivation, function, and impact of names and naming in North America and around the world.  NAMES is the academic journal of the American Name Society (ANS)NAMES is listed in the following abstracting and indexing databases:

Arts &Humanities Citation Index*
CSA Worldwide Political Science Abstracts
Current Abstracts
Current Contents - Arts & Humanities*
Current Contents - Social & Behavioral Sciences*
European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH PLUS)
Genamics JournalSeek
Humanities International Complete
Linguistics Abstracts
Linguistic Bibliography
Linguistics and Language Behaviour Abstracts
Literary Reference Center
MLA
Scopus
Smithsonian Institution Libraries
Social Services Abstracts
Social Sciences Citation Index*
Sociological Abstracts: Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts
The Southern Quarterly
TOC Premier

NAMES and Open Access

In the interest of promoting widespread awarness of the importance of names and naming, NAMES provides immediate "open access" to all its content. The publisher of NAMES, the University Library System at the University of Pittsburgh, abides by the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition of Open Access:

“By ‘open access’, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these 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, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”

Researchers engage in discovery for both the scientific community and the public good overall. Unfortunately, however, due to prohibitive financial and/or use restrictions imposed by non open access publishers, their research results are not made readily available to the full range of potential users. The short and long-term detrimental repercussions of this restricted access are significant and widespread.

As a part of its official constitutional mandate, the American Name Society is committed to promoting knowledge of and appreciation for names and naming patterns among both the expert and lay community.  Towards that end,  in an effort to encourage the free and ready exchange of onomastic knowledge, the American Name Society has made all of the research published its journal, NAMES, open to the public and reusable under the terms of a Creative Commons CC-BY license. Furthermore, NAMES charges no fees for article submission, processing, or online production. Our publisher, the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh, is a participating member of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC.org) and the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA.org) and makes the journal’s citation and abstract data openly available via CrossRef

The Author is 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), as long as there is provided in the document an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

Authors are permitted and encouraged to post online a pre-publication manuscript (but not the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version of the Work) in institutional repositories or on their Websites prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. Any such posting made before acceptance and publication of the Work shall be updated upon publication to include a reference to the Publisher-assigned DOI (Digital Object Identifier) and a link to the online abstract for the final published Work in the Journal.

Since NAMES became an Open Acces Journal, authors who publish their work in NAMES hold the copyright to their works, which are distributed under a Creative Commons-Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Before 2021, authors transferred their copyright to NAMES, and NAMES has released those articles under the same Creative Commons-Attribution (CC-BY) license. This means that any work published in NAMES is free to reprint, remix, transform, and/or build upon for any purpose, even commercial, under the condition that attribution is clearly made to the original publication in NAMES.