Why you should post your papers to SocArXiv

 

By Elizabeth Popp Berman

Academia.edu. ResearchGate. Your personal website. You have lots of options for posting your preprints online. Why should you upload them to SocArXiv?

Because you want them to reach people, and because you believe in open access to social science.

You know that posting your work online can extend its audience—to academic peers, journalists, and the wider public—by getting it out from behind journal paywalls. But papers at a personal website aren’t always picked up by academic search engines, and they lack the metadata to maximize your visibility.

And new corporate intermediaries are trying to insert themselves between your research and others’ ability to read it. Uploading to sites like Academia and ResearchGate will reach some of your colleagues. But not every researcher has (or wants) an account, and they’re not designed to provide access to the broader public.

More importantly, while they provide a free service now, these are for-profit enterprises that have to find a way to monetize the content you provide—your research. Academia, for example, recently floated the idea of asking users to pay “a small fee” for papers to be “considered” for recommendation by peers. Expanding access to knowledge is not these companies’ primary mission.

The last couple of years have seen smaller endeavors—first Mendeley, and now the Social Science Research Network (SSRN)—swallowed up by Elsevier, the 800-pound gorilla of for-profit academic publishing. With a trend toward consolidation and a drive to make money, these sites do not have the best interest of social science in mind.

SocArXiv: the open-source alternative

SocArXiv is the noncommercial, open-source alternative to this enclosure of the commons. Uploading your papers to SocArXiv provides a fast, simple way to make your work available and discoverable to the widest possible audience—while also linking you to an emerging community of social scientists and a rapidly developing set of research tools.

We won’t spam everyone (or anyone) you’ve ever met with requests to sign up. And through our link with the Open Science Framework, you’ll also be able to upload data, code, documentation, presentations, and any other files related to your research, and have the option of inviting comments and discussion of your work.

Using SocArXiv is good for you. But it’s also good for social science. Developed in collaboration with the Center for Open Science (COS), SocArXiv’s sole mission is to maximize access to social science and improve its quality. And because we’re noncommercial, we can keep service to social science at the heart of our mission.

In addition, the partnership between SocArXiv and COS means that archiving preprints is just the beginning. COS, home of the Reproducibility Project in psychology, provides free, open-access tools to support data sharing, project collaboration, and pre-registration of studies. As it grows, SocArXiv also plans to develop peer review options, support research communities, and public open-access electronic journals. Like COS, we want individual incentives for researchers to align better with good scientific practices.

How do I start?

Getting started is quick and easy. As we roll out, we have implemented a temporary process for collecting papers. Take five minutes to follow these three easy steps and help us reach a critical mass:

1. Email socarxiv-Preprint@osf.io from your primary email address.
2. The subject of the email should be your paper title. The body of the email should be your abstract. Attach the paper as a pdf, Word document, or other file.
3. Hit send.

That’s it. An Open Science Framework account will be created for you, and your paper will show up here at the temporary site. If you want, you can add tags to make it easier to find. When the full site rolls out, your paper will automatically be included.

You can upload any documents or files you have not specifically signed away rights to share. This includes conference papers, working papers, datasets and code. For most journals, you have the right to post a preprint—and sometimes the published version—of a publication. SocArXiv will track multiple versions of papers, so readers see the most up-to-date while a historical record is retained.

Concerned about journal restrictions? RoMEO maintains an extensive list of journal copyright policies that will reassure you. In sociology, for example:

• The American Journal of Sociology allows archiving of both preprints and final published versions, as do open-access journals like Sociological Science and Socius.
• Other ASA journals, including the American Sociological Review, the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social Psychology Quarterly, Sociological Methodology, Sociological Theory, Sociology of Education, allow preprint posting with a link to the published version.
• A wide range of journals in which sociologists publish, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Criminology, Demography, Gender and Society, Journal of Marriage and Family, Politics and Society, Social Forces, Social Problems, Socio-Economic Review, Sociological Forum, Theory and Society, and many others, have similar policies.

Imagine if anyone, inside or outside academia, had access to all your research, and could reach it through a simple open web search. Social science doesn’t have to be walled off. Help us make open access a reality. Add your research to SocArXiv.

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Visit SocArXiv.org for more information or to sign up for updates. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook. To make a tax-deductible contribution to SocArXiv through the University of Maryland, visit:http://go.umd.edu/SocArXiv.