... [W]ait a minute, you might say, archiving and publishing are very different things. Scholars publish; librarians archive. Right? Well, the lines have blurred, as has the very definition of what constitutes publishing today. ...
"Publishing" one's work in an institutional or disciplinary repository exposes that work intelligently to the web through metadata--and this goes for scholarly work that has already appeared in conventional journals as well as for work undergoing review. All work submitted to these archives has its content described in appropriate metadata fields, making it machine readable (see my prior post about how this works with data harvesters). The result is that scholarship (even work still under review) can have relevance far beyond the limited scope of the subscribers to a specific academic journal--and it can appear far sooner than in that journal where the work will finally get its more limited release. Of course, any pre-print gets linked to the "official" version (wherever that may reside) once that version appears.
Depositing one's scholarship in one of these electronic archives can be seen as a kind of co-pubishing. The organizations that run them don't review the scholarship; they leave that to traditional methods. ...
arXiv.org or Social Science Research Network are now high-profile, high-traffic hubs of scholarly inquiry. They are what journals have been to a prior generation, or perhaps journals and academic conferences combined. They are not just huge databases passively hosting documents until a search awakens their sleeping contents. No, they are destination sites for scholars keeping up in their fields. ...
The humanities lack a significant central disciplinary repository such as arXiv.org, but minor disciplinary repositories for the humanities have begun to appear, such as the Nordic arts and humanities e-print archive (hprints.org). ...
Still want to keep your publishing and research limited to that small set of reputable journals?
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 1/29/2009 08:57:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
