Category: Announcements

SocArXiv moratorium on AI-topic papers, policy in formation

In light of record submission rates and a large volume of AI-generated slop papers, SocArXiv recently implemented a policy requiring ORCID accounts linked in the OSF profile of submitting authors, and narrowing our focus to social science subjects (see this announcement). Today we are taking two more steps:

1. We are pausing new submissions about AI topics for 90 days. That is, papers about AI models, testing AI models, proposing AI models, theories about the future of AI and so on. We will make exceptions for papers that are already accepted for publication (or already published) in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. And we will make exceptions for empirical social science research about AI in society – for example, a study on how AI use affects workers in an organization – on a case-by-case basis. The purpose of this pause is to make it faster and easier for moderators to reject these papers, and encourage these authors to find other ways of distributing their work.

If your empirical social science research paper on an AI topic is rejected and you would like to appeal, please email us a link to the paper at socarxiv@gmail.com with a short note of explanation. We apologize for requiring this step.

2. We are developing a policy for AI-related work. We need a better, formal policy on AI-generated and LLM-assisted content. We have formed a committee of volunteers from our social science and library science networks to gather existing policies from other services and publications, and decide what policy is right for us. This includes the values we want to support, the work we are able to do, and the technical needs and requirements we have in doing our moderation and hosting. We hope this policy will be ready to implement when the 90-day pause on AI-related papers ends.

If you have expertise or suggestions for us in this work, we would appreciate hearing from you.

SocArXiv submission rule changes

Context

SocArXiv is experiencing record high submission rates. In addition, now that we have paper versioning – which is great – our moderators have to approve every paper revision. As a result, our volunteer workload is increasing.

In addition we are receiving many non-research, spam, and AI-generated submissions. We do not have a technological way of identifying these, and it is time-consuming to read and assess them according to our moderation rules.

We also don’t have moderation workflow tools that allow us to, for example, sort incoming papers by subject, to get them to specific expert moderators. So all our moderators look at all papers as they come in. That encourages us to think about narrowing the range of subjects we accept.

The two rule changes below are intended to help manage the increased moderator burden. More policy changes may follow if the volume keeps increasing.

1. ORCID requirement

We require the submitting author to have a publicly accessible ORCID linked from the OSF profile page, with a name that matches that on the paper and the OSF account.

In the case of non-bibliographic submittors (e.g., a research assistant submitting for a supervisor), the first author must have an ORCID. We can make exceptions for institutional submitters upon request, such as journals that upload their papers for authors.

At present we are not requiring additional verification or specific trust markers on the ORCID (such as email or employer verification), just the existence of an account that lists the author’s name. It’s not a foolproof identity verification, obviously, but it adds a step for scammers, and also helps identify pseudonymous authors, which we do not permit. We may take advantage of ORCID’s trust markers program in the future and require additional elements on the ORCID record.

We are happy to host papers by independent scholars, but a disproportionate share of non-research, spam, and AI-generated submissions come from independent scholars, many of whom do not have ORCIDs. For those scholars with institutional affiliations, we urge you to get an ORCID. This is a good practice that we should all endorse.

2. Focus on social sciences

At its founding, SocArXiv did not want to maintain disciplinary boundaries. It was our intention to be the big paper server for all of social sciences, and we couldn’t draw an easy line between social sciences and some humanities subjects, especially history, philosophy, religious studies, and some area studies, which are humanities in the taxonomy we use, but have significant overlap with social sciences. It was more logical just to accept them all.

As the volume has increased, this has become less practical. In addition, a lot of junk and AI submissions are in the areas of religion, philosophy, and various language studies. We also don’t have moderators working in arts and humanities, and our moderators trained in social sciences are not expert at reviewing these papers. Finally, there is an excellent, open humanities archive: Knowledge Commons (KC Works), which is freely available for humanities scholars. With approval from that service, we will now direct authors to their site for papers we are rejecting in arts and humanities subjects.

We continue to accept papers in education and law, which are also generally adjacent to social science.

For a limited time we will accept revisions of papers we already host in arts and humanities, but urge those authors to include links to Knowledge Commons or somewhere else that can host their work in the future.

We will assess papers that include arts/humanities as well as social science subject identifiers, and if we determine they are principally in art/humanities, reject them.

We will continue to host all work we have already accepted.

SocArXiv wins Kohli Foundation for Sociology 2025 Infrastructure Prize

University of Maryland Libraries news release

May 7, 2025

The Kohli Foundation for Sociology has announced that SocArXiv is the winner of its 2025 Infrastructure Prize for Sociology. This honor especially recognizes the leadership of SocArXiv founder Professor Philip N. Cohen of the Department of Sociology.

SocArXiv (pronounced “sosh-archive”) is an innovative open archive of the social sciences, providing a free, nonprofit, open access platform for social scientists to upload working papers, preprints, and published papers, with the option to link research materials such as data and code.

SocArXiv now hosts 17,000 papers across all disciplines in social sciences, arts, humanities, education, and law, in many languages. It is institutionally housed by the UMD libraries and operates on the Open Science Platform of the Center for Open Science.

“With the support of the UMD Libraries, and our platform at the Center for Open Science, we do it all at no charge for authors or readers, on a surprisingly small annual budget and a dedicated team of volunteers working a couple of hours a week,” Cohen said.

“The UMD Libraries and SocArXiv are partners in supporting open and equitable access to research for the public good. We are proud to serve as SocArXiv’s institutional home and congratulate SocArXiv on this well-deserved recognition,” said Interim Dean of the University Libraries Daniel Mack.

This Kohli Infrastructure Prize honors scholars, projects, and organizations that have made exceptional contributions to the development of substantial infrastructures that advance sociological knowledge, and comes with an award of 10,000 euros, more than $11,000.

SocArXiv is one of the efforts in which Cohen is involved that focuses on reforming the system of scholarly communication. He often speaks on the topic of how scholars can productively engage with public audiences, to improve work and deepen its impact. He explores related topics in his new book, “Citizen Scholar: Public Engagement for Social Scientists” (Columbia University Press, 2025).

“SocArXiv has been a labor of love for me since 2016, helping thousands of researchers to get their work done, but the efforts of myself and our volunteers often go unnoticed. So it’s wonderful to have this recognition,” Cohen said. “SocArXiv is a nonprofit, academy-owned and directed, collaborative project of volunteers from sociology and other social sciences, and members of the library community. This recognition honors that collective effort to pave a new way forward in scholarly communication. There is a lot we can do ourselves—faster, better, and cheaper than we can under the big academic publishers—and we’re proving it every day.”

“These papers are often available before journal publication, allowing them to disseminate further, and faster,” Cohen said.

The platform’s many-hands-on-deck approach has facilitated knowledge sharing even during difficult times. For example, a draft paper on learning losses amid COVID-related school closures was uploaded to SocArXiv and downloaded tens of thousands of times, and was therefore serving as a resource and point of reference to countless scholars and researchers before it was ultimately published in PNAS. This kind of open exchange of information and ideas has helped researchers to be more nimble and more productive.

Looking ahead, Cohen said he and his collaborators are working to make the repository a place for hosting peer review projects as well, so that people who want to conduct peer review in a transparent setting—with evolving versions, reviews and replies—can integrate their work onto SocArXiv.

As collaboration and knowledge sharing are priorities of the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, Dean Susan Rivera said this recognition of Cohen and the networks that SocArXiv has forged is especially meaningful.

“Our college community congratulates Professor Cohen and his collaborators. It is fitting that their impactful work promoting open science is being honored in this significant way,” Rivera said. “This important platform is a point of pride for BSOS.”

Cohen has been invited to represent SocArXiv at the foundation’s awards ceremony in November at the European University Institute in Fiesole, Florence, Italy. Cohen has also been invited to be a guest on a Kohli Foundation podcast.

“A key priority of SocArXiv is to open up social science, to reach more people more effectively, to improve research, and build the future of scholarly communication,” Cohen said. “We hope that the visibility this award brings will draw more scholars and users to the platform.”

New versioning capacity at SocArXiv

News! SocArXiv host OSF now supports better versioning of papers, making it easier to cite, share, and update papers – and new versions are moderated. This will also support new, more transparent publishing models. For details and guidance, see this guide from our hosts at OSF: https://help.osf.io/article/673-update-a-new-version-of-a-preprint. Ask us if you need help!

SocArXiv joins preprint services in endorsing OSTP memo

DallE open science collage

The SocArXiv steering committee joins the preprint services arXiv and ioRxiv/medRxiv in their recent statements in support of the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memo that directs the federal government to make outputs from government-funded research publicly accessible without charge or embargo. We endorse these statements, and reproduce them below.

arXiv OSTP memorandum response

April 11, 2023

The recent Office of Science and Technology Policy “Nelson Memorandum” on “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research”1 is a welcome affirmation of the public right to access government funded research results, including publication of articles describing the research, and the data behind the research. The policy is likely to increase access to new and ongoing research, enable equitable access to the outcome of publicly funded research efforts, and enable and accelerate more research. Improved immediate access to research results may provide significant general social and economic benefits to the public.

Funding Agencies can expedite public access to research results through the distribution of electronic preprints of results in open repositories, in particular existing preprint distribution servers such as arXiv,2 bioRxiv,3 and medRxiv.4 Distribution of preprints of research results enables rapid and free accessibility of the findings worldwide, circumventing publication delays of months, or, in some cases, years. Rapid circulation of research results expedites scientific discourse, shortens the cycle of discovery and accelerates the pace of discovery.5

Distribution of research findings by preprints, combined with curation of the archive of submissions, provides universal access for both authors and readers in perpetuity. Authors can provide updated versions of the research, including “as accepted,” with the repositories openly tracking the progress of the revision of results through the scientific process. Public access to the corpus of machine readable research manuscripts provides innovative channels for discovery and additional knowledge generation, including links to the data behind the research, open software tools, and supplemental information provided by authors.

Preprint repositories support a growing and innovative ecosystem for discovery and evaluation of research results, including tools for improved accessibility and research summaries. Experiments in open review and crowdsourced commenting can be layered over preprint repositories, providing constructive feedback and alternative models to the increasingly archaic process of anonymous peer review.

Distribution of research results by preprints provides a well tested path for immediate, free, and equitable access to research results. Preprint archives can support and sustain an open and innovative ecosystem of tools for research discovery and verification, providing a long term and sustainable approach for open access to publicly funded research.

1White House OSTP Public Access Memo

2arXiv website

3bioRxiv website

4medRxiv website

5NIH Preprint Pilot, “The Pace of Artificial Intelligence Innovations: Speed, Talent, and Trial-and-Error”

bioRxiv and medRxiv response to the OSTP memo – an open letter to US funding agencies

2023-04-11

The preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv welcome the recent Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memo advising US government agencies to make publications and data from research funded by US taxpayers publicly accessible immediately, without embargo or cost. This new policy will stimulate research, increase equitability, and generate health, environmental and social benefits not only in the US but all around the world.

Agencies can enable free public access to research results simply by mandating that reports of federally funded research are made available as “preprints” on servers such as arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, and chemRxiv, before being submitted for journal publication. This will ensure that the findings are freely accessible to anyone anywhere in the world. An important additional benefit is the immediate availability of the information, avoiding the long delays associated with evaluation by traditional scientific journals (typically around one year). Scientific inquiry then progresses faster, as has been particularly evident for COVID research during the pandemic.

Prior access mandates in the US and elsewhere have focused on articles published by academic journals. This complicated the issue by making it a question of how to adapt journal revenue streams and led to the emergence of new models based on article-processing charges (APCs). But APCs simply move the access barrier to authors: they are a significant financial obstacle for researchers in fields and communities that lack the funding to pay them. A preprint mandate would achieve universal access for both authors and readers upstream, ensuring the focus remains on providing access to research findings, rather than on how they are selected and filtered.

Mandating public access to preprints rather than articles in academic journals would also future-proof agencies’ access policies. The distinction between peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed material is blurring as new approaches make peer review an ongoing process rather than a judgment made at a single point in time. Peer review can be conducted independently of journals through initiatives like Review Commons. And traditional journal-based peer review is changing: for example, eLife, supported by several large funders, peer reviews submitted papers but no longer distinguishes accepted from rejected articles. The author’s “accepted” manuscript that is the focus of so-called Green Open Access policies may therefore no longer exist. Because of such ongoing change, mandating the free availability of preprints would be a straightforward and strategically astute policy for US funding agencies.

A preprint mandate would underscore the fundamental, often overlooked, point that it is the results of research to which the public should have access. The evaluation of that research by journals is part of an ongoing process of assessment that can take place after the results have been made openly available. Preprint mandates from the funders of research would also widen the possibilities for evolution within the system and avoid channeling it towards expensive APC-based publishing models. Furthermore, since articles on preprint servers can be accompanied by supplementary data deposits on the servers themselves or linked to data deposited elsewhere, preprint mandates would also provide mechanisms to accomplish the other important OSTP goal: availability of research data.

Richard Sever and John Inglis
Co-Founders, bioRxiv and medRxiv
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York, NY11724

Harlan Krumholz and Joseph Ross
Co-founders, medRxiv
Yale University, New Haven, CT06520

On withdrawing “Ivermectin and the odds of hospitalization due to COVID-19,” by Merino et al

On withdrawing “Ivermectin and the odds of hospitalization due to COVID-19,” by Merino et al.

4 February 2022

Preamble by Philip N. Cohen, director of SocArXiv

SocArXiv’s steering committee has decided to withdraw the paper, “Ivermectin and the odds of hospitalization due to COVID-19: evidence from a quasi-experimental analysis based on a public intervention in Mexico City,” by Jose Merino, Victor Hugo Borja, Oliva Lopez, José Alfredo Ochoa, Eduardo Clark, Lila Petersen, and Saul Caballero. [10.31235/osf.io/r93g4]

The paper is a report on a program in Mexico City that gave people medical kits when they tested positive for COVID-19, containing, among other things, ivermectin tablets. The conclusion of the paper is, “The study supports ivermectin-based interventions to assuage the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the health system.”

The lead author of the paper, José Merino, head of the Digital Agency for Public Innovation (DAPI), a government agency in Mexico City, tweeted about the paper: “Es una GRAN noticia poder validar una política pública que permitió reducir impactos en salud por covid19” (translation: “It is GREAT news to be able to validate a public policy that allowed reducing health impacts from covid19”). The other authors are officials at the Mexican Social Security Institute and the Mexico City Ministry of Health, and employees at the DAPI.

We have written about this paper previously. We wrote, in part:

“Depending on which critique you prefer, the paper is either very poor quality or else deliberately false and misleading. PolitiFact debunked it here, partly based on this factcheck in Portuguese. We do not believe it provides reliable or useful information, and we are disappointed that it has been very popular (downloaded almost 10,000 times so far). … We do not have a policy to remove papers like this from our service, which meet submission criteria when we post them but turn out to be harmful. However, we could develop one, such as a petition process or some other review trigger. This is an open discussion.”

The paper has now been downloaded more than 11,000 times, among our most-read papers of the past year. Since we posted that statement, the paper has received more attention. In particular, an article in Animal Politico in Mexico reported that the government of Mexico City has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on ivermectin, which it still distributes (as of January 2022) to people who test positive for COVID-19. In response, University of California-San Diego sociology professor Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra posted an appeal to SocArXiv asking us to remove the “deeply problematic and unethical” paper and ban its authors from our platform. The appeal, in a widely shared Twitter thread, argued that the authors, through their agency dispensing the medication, unethically recruited experimental subjects, apparently without informed consent, and thus the study is an unethical study; they did not declare a conflict of interest, although they are employees of agencies that carried out the policy. The thread was shared or liked by thousands of people. The article and response to the article prompted us to revisit this paper. On February 1, I promised to bring the issue to our Steering Committee for further discussion.

I am not a medical researcher, although I am a social scientist reasonably well-versed in public health research. I won’t provide a scholarly review of research on ivermectin. However, it is clear from the record of authoritative statements by global and national public health agencies that, at present, ivermectin should not be used as a treatment or preventative for COVID-19 outside of carefully controlled clinical studies, which this clearly was not. These are some of those statements, reflecting current guidance as of 3 February 2022.

  • World Health Organization: “We recommend not to use ivermectin, except in the context of a clinical trial.”
  • US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: “ivermectin has not been proven as a way to prevent or treat COVID-19.”
  • US National Institutes of Health: “There is insufficient evidence for the COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel (the Panel) to recommend either for or against the use of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19.”
  • European Medicines Agency: “use of ivermectin for prevention or treatment of COVID-19 cannot currently be recommended outside controlled clinical trials.”
  • US Food and Drug Administration: “The FDA has not authorized or approved ivermectin for use in preventing or treating COVID-19 in humans or animals. … Currently available data do not show ivermectin is effective against COVID-19.”

For reference,  the scientific flaws in the paper are enumerated  at the links above from PolitiFact, partly based on this factcheck from Estado in Portuguese, which included expert consultation. I also found this thread from Omar Yaxmehen Bello-Chavolla useful.

In light of this review, a program to publicly distribute ivermectin to people infected with COVID-19, outside of a controlled study, seems unethical. The paper is part of such a program, and currently serves as part of its justification.

To summarize, there remains insufficient evidence that ivermectin is effective in treating COVID-19; the study is of minimal scientific value at best; the paper is part of an unethical program by the government of Mexico City to dispense hundreds of thousands of doses of an inappropriate medication to people who were sick with COVID-19, which possibly continues to the present; the authors of the paper have promoted it as evidence that their medical intervention is effective. This review is intended to help the SocArXiv Steering Committee reach a decision on the request to remove the paper (we set aside the question of banning the authors from future submissions, which is reserved for people who repeatedly violate our rules). The statement below followed from this review.

SocArXiv Steering Committee statement on withdrawing the paper by Merino et al. (10.31235/osf.io/r93g4).

This is the first time we have used our prerogative as service administrators to withdraw a paper from SocArXiv. Although we reject many papers, according to our moderation policy, we don’t have a policy for unilaterally withdrawing papers after they have been posted. We don’t want to make policy around a single case, but we do want to respond to this situation.

We are withdrawing the paper, and replacing it with a “tombstone” that includes the paper’s metadata. We are doing this to prevent the paper from causing additional harm, and taking this incident as an impetus to develop a more comprehensive policy for future situations. The metadata will serve as a reference for people who follow citations to the paper to our site.

Our grounds for this decision are several:

  1. The paper is spreading misinformation, promoting an unproved medical treatment in the midst of a global pandemic.
  2. The paper is part of, and justification for, a government program that unethically dispenses (or did dispense) unproven medication apparently without proper consent or appropriate ethical protections according to the standards of human subjects research.
  3. The paper is medical research – purporting to study the effects of a medication on a disease outcome – and is not properly within the subject scope of SocArXiv.
  4. The authors did not properly disclose their conflicts of interest.

We appreciate that of the thousands of papers we have accepted and now host on our platform, there may be others that have serious flaws as well.

We are taking this unprecedented action because this particular bad paper appears to be more important, and therefore potentially more harmful, than other flawed work. In administering SocArXiv, we generally err on the side of inclusivity, and do not provide peer review or substantive vetting of the papers we host. Taking such an approach suits us philosophically, and also practically, since we don’t have staff to review every paper fully. But this approach comes with the responsibility to respond when something truly harmful gets through. In light of demonstrable harms like those associated with this paper, and in response to a community groundswell beseeching us to act, we are withdrawing this paper.

We reiterate that our moderation process does not involve peer review, or substantive evaluation, of the research papers that we host. Our moderation policy confirms only that papers are (1) scholarly, (2) in research areas that we support, (3) are plausibly categorized, (4) are correctly attributed, (5) are in languages that we moderate, and (6) are in text-searchable formats. Posting a paper on SocArXiv is not in itself an indication of good quality – but it is often a sign that researchers are acting in good faith and practicing open scholarship for the public good. We urge readers to consider this incident in the context of the greater good that open science and preprints in general, and our service in particular, do for researchers and the communities they serve.

We welcome comments and suggestions from readers, researchers, and the public. Feel free to email us at socarxiv@gmail.com, or contact us on our social media accounts at Twitter or Facebook.

University of Maryland Libraries becomes the institutional home of SocArXiv

the word 'sustainable' over an image of green beans.
photo flickr cc: https://flic.kr/p/7T3X56.

This announcement comes from the UMD Libraries.

The University of Maryland (UMD) Libraries is pleased to announce that it has become the institutional home of SocArXiv, an interdisciplinary, open access repository of scholarship. The new partnership between the Libraries and SocArXiv ensures the future development and sustainability of the repository, which had previously received seed funding from the libraries at the University of California, Los Angeles, (UCLA) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with additional support from the Sloan Foundation, the Open Societies Foundation, and the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences at UMD. Working with partners, the UMD Libraries will sponsor SocArXiv to help sustain shared infrastructure for open scholarship and to provide equitable access to this diverse collection of research for scholars at UMD and around the world.

Founded in 2016, SocArXiv is a digital repository of research papers which is free for authors and readers alike. SocArXiv is governed by a volunteer steering committee of scholars and library community leaders, with University of Maryland sociology professor Philip N. Cohen as the founding director. As of April 2021, the repository holds almost 8,000 papers in all fields of social and behavioral sciences, arts and humanities, education, and law. It provides a shared platform for social scientists and other scholars to upload working papers, preprints, and published papers, with the option to link data and code. Papers in multiple languages are moderated by an international team of volunteer academic researchers. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the pace of new papers posting at SocArXiv has increased, and there are now more than 500 papers related to the pandemic.

SocArXiv is based on the Open Science Framework (OSF) platform of the nonprofit Center for Open Science (COS). This arrangement will continue under the new partnership between the UMD Libraries and SocArXiv. Eric Olson, Institutional Product Owner at COS, said: “We believe that transparent and reproducible research and research products lead to better outcomes. By helping to sustain SocArXiv, UMD Libraries and its partners will continue to advance the shared platforms, tools, and systems that promote open science and open access in the research community.”

“We are delighted to be joining the Libraries at UMD, which is a leader in the growing movement for open scholarship,” said Cohen. “As the first preprint service available on the COS platform, SocArXiv has been an innovator in this arena during an exciting period. We are grateful for the Libraries’ support and look forward to working with the team here to build the future of academy-owned scholarly communication infrastructure.”

“SocArXiv fits into the UMD Libraries’ strategies related to enhancing open access and supporting academy-owned infrastructure for scholarly communication,” added Adriene Lim, Dean of Libraries. “It has an outstanding reputation in the field and we’re proud to be the institutional home and sustain this valuable resource for the entire research community. We look forward to working with Dr. Cohen, COS, and SocArXiv’s steering committee in the future to enhance equitable access for research, teaching, and learning.”

The Libraries also manages the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland (DRUM), which hosts material from UMD researchers, including theses and dissertations as well as research articles. In the future, SocArXiv hopes to integrate submission of Maryland researchers’ content with DRUM, extending the reach of UMD’s research output, as well as leveraging other benefits offered by SocArXiv.

To learn more about SocArXiv, visit SocOpen.org and SocArXiv.org.

ABOUT THE UMD LIBRARIES
As the largest university library system in the Washington D.C.-Baltimore area, the University of Maryland (UMD) Libraries serve more than 41,000 students and 14,000 faculty and staff of the flagship College Park campus. The Libraries’ extensive collections, programs, and services enable student success, support teaching, research, and creativity, and enrich the intellectual and cultural life of the community. A member of the Big Ten Academic Alliance and the Association of Research Libraries, the UMD Libraries was honored with the 2020 Excellence in Academic Libraries award in the university category from the Association of College and Research Libraries.
Last update: May 05, 2021

SocArXiv policy on withdrawing papers

The Center for Open Science has added withdrawal functionality to its preprint service platform. We are glad to have this capacity, but we will not be permitting the withdrawal of papers in routine cases. Withdrawing is a convenient option if an author makes an error in the submission process, for example accidentally submitting the wrong version; if a paper has not yet been approved, we are happy to accommodate such requests. However, if a paper has already been accepted, and thus entered the scholarly record, we will follow the policy below.

Unfortunately, authors now see a large “Withdraw Paper” button on the page where they edit their paper entries. We are working with COS to change how this option is presented to authors, and also to make users aware of our policy. Posting a paper on SocArXiv is easy, which brings great benefit to the thousands of people who have shared their work. However, authors should be aware that posting papers is generally nonreversible. We offer this policy and its explanation to help further this understanding.

Dog leaping fearlessly off a dock into water
Photo by Emery Way https://flic.kr/p/5JMYz7

SocArXiv Withdrawal Policy

May 25, 2019

In case of revision, the current version will be found here.

The Center for Open Science (COS), which hosts SocArXiv, has enabled the withdrawal of papers from its paper services. Authors who wish to withdraw their papers may request a withdrawal from the SocArXiv moderators, according to the terms of this policy.

Permission for withdrawal will only be granted in the very rare circumstance in which we have a legal obligation to remove a paper, such as if it contains private personal information or it is subject to a substantiated copyright claim. In cases where a paper is withdrawn, it will be replaced by a “tombstone” page (here is an example), which includes the original paper’s metadata (author, title, abstract, DOI, etc.), and the reason for withdrawal. After that point, the paper will be locked to further modification.

Papers that infringe on copyrights will be removed in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, under the Center for Open Science terms of use, available here.

If authors wish to withdraw papers for other reasons — for example, if they are not confident of the findings or otherwise no longer endorse the paper — they should post a new “version” of the paper that is a single page announcing the withdrawal. They may, for example, request that readers do not further cite, use, or distribute previous versions (which will remain available under the list of previous versions). Instructions on how to post a new version are available here; we are happy to help authors do this.

This policy is very similar to the retraction of an article by an academic journal, which only rarely involves removal of access to the original paper, instead generally relying on a notification of retraction in its place.

Instructions for request a withdrawal are available here: http://help.osf.io/m/preprints/l/1069374-withdrawing-a-preprint

Why doesn’t SocArXiv let authors decide when to withdraw a paper?

Papers on SocArXiv are part of the scholarly record. Upon being posted, they are given a Digital Object Identifier (DOIs), and a persistent URL from COS. The link is automatically tweeted by our announcement account, and the system also generates a citation reference. The document is immediately citable and retrievable by human or machine agents. In short, posting a paper on SocArXiv is a research event that cannot be undone by deleting the document. Preserving the scholarly record is our obligation to the scholarly community.

Authors who post papers on SocArXiv are notified, at the final point of submission, that they will be “unable to delete the preprint file, but [they] can update or modify it.” Authors also are required to confirm that all contributors have agreed to share the paper, and that they have the right to share it. (All co-authors have the same rights to distribute a copyrighted work, unless a subsequent agreement has intervened, so an objection to the posting by a co-author is not the basis for removal.)

The Internet has made it possible to distribute work without relinquishing the original digital file, which makes it possible to delete the version readers access — a privilege that was not available when research was distributed in printed form. However, the Internet has also made it difficult or impossible to remove all traces or copies of a digital document. This is a challenging environment for authors.

We are sympathetic to the desire of some authors to remove copies of their earlier work from circulation, for a variety of reasons, and we appreciate that our policy may cause frustration. We hope authors will carefully consider it before they post their work.

Our policy is very similar to that employed by the older and more established preprint servers, arxiv and bioRxiv.

bioRxiv’s FAQ page reads:

Can I remove an article that has already posted on bioRxiv?

No. Manuscripts posted on bioRxiv receive DOI’s and thus are citable and part of the scientific record. They are indexed by services such as Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, and Crossref, creating a permanent digital presence independent of bioRxiv records. Consequently, bioRxiv’s policy is that papers cannot be removed. Authors may, however, have their article marked as “Withdrawn” if they no longer stand by their findings/conclusions or acknowledge fundamental errors in the article. In these cases, a statement explaining the reason for the withdrawal is posted on the bioRxiv article page to which the DOI defaults; the original article is still accessible via the article history tab. In extremely rare, exceptional cases, papers are removed for legal reasons.

At this writing, just 32 out of 50,401 preprints on bioRxiv have been withdrawn, a rate of 6 per 10,000.

On arXiv, the instructions read:

Articles that have been announced and made public cannot be completely removed. A withdrawal creates a new version of the paper marked as withdrawn. That new version displays the reason for the withdrawal and does not link directly to the full text. Previous versions will still be accessible, including the full text.

On the other hand, at least one paper service, Elsevier’s SSRN (formerly the Social Science Research Network), allows authors to delete their papers from their repository immediately for any reason (FAQ). Similarly, some authors choose to distribute their work on their own websites, where they have more complete control over the contents. We believe these approaches put the needs of the author of over those of the research community. While a reasonable choice in some cases, this represents a philosophy different from ours.

We want an open, equitable, inclusive scholarly ecosystem in which people are free to share and use information as freely as possible. We have created this policy to serve that goal.

With gift from MIT Libraries, SocArXiv offers 2019 SOAR awards

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PNC photo / CC-BY-SA / https://flic.kr/p/PG3njh

With the support of a generous gift from MIT Libraries, SocArXiv is delighted to announce the 2019 Sociology Open Access Recognition awards. With SOAR, people who win paper awards from sections of the American Sociological Association — for papers posted on SocArXiv — will get $250 to help cover their travel to the conference in New York City this summer.

So, if you’ve submitted a paper to be considered for an American Sociological Association section award – including a graduate student award – consider posting it on SocArXiv as well. Any paper that is uploaded by April 15 and wins a 2019 ASA section award will receive a SOAR award of $250 in recognition of your achievement. Support open access, gain recognition, and win money all at the same time!

How it works

You upload your paper to SocArXiv by April 15. Once you find out you’ve won a section award, email socarxiv@gmail.com to notify us. We’ll send you a check for $250 to help cover your travel, as well as publicizing your paper and officially conferring a SOAR award. That’s the whole deal.

Sharing your paper through SocArXiv is a win-win. It’s good for you, because you get the word out about your research. It’s good for social science, because more people have access to ungated information. And now, with SOAR prizes for award-winning papers, it can be good for your wallet, too.

Frequently Asked Questions

  1. What happens if I submitted a paper, but don’t notify SocArXiv it’s won a section award?

You will only receive a SOAR award if you let SocArXiv know at socarxiv@gmail.com by August 31, 2019 that your paper has won an ASA section award.

  1. What if I upload my paper after I win the section award?

Any papers uploaded by April 15, 2019 are eligible. We welcome later sharing of papers, but they will not be eligible for SOAR awards.

  1. Does the version submitted to SocArXiv have to be identical with the version submitted to the ASA section?

No. For example, if you upload to SocArXiv a pre-copyediting version of your published paper that you have permission to share, but send the award committee the published version, you are still eligible for the award.

  1. I’d love to upload my paper, but my copyright agreement doesn’t allow me to. What do I do?

First, you may still have the right to upload some version of the paper, even if it is not the final published version. Check your author agreement, or the Sherpa/ROMEO database for the preprint policies of many academic journals. If you really can’t share any version, you are unfortunately not eligible for a SOAR award. But keep in mind for next time that copyright agreements can often be edited or amended. You don’t have to give away all rights to your work.

  1. I am a graduate student submitting a paper for a graduate student section award. Am I still eligible?

Yes. ASA section awards for graduate student papers are also eligible for SOAR.

  1. I am submitting my paper for an award in another disciplinary association. Am I eligible for SOAR?

At present SOAR awards are limited to papers recognized by ASA sections. However, we are always interested in building partnerships with other organizations and disciplines. Please reach out to us at socarxiv@gmail.com if you are interested in developing a similar program for your organization.

SocArXiv welcomes new steering committee members

We are delighted to welcome five new steering committee members:

* Friends of SocArXiv will recognize Brittany Dernberger as our former graduate coordinator, and Kelsey Drotning, who now fills that role. They have both contributed to our administration and decision-making for a while, so this is more a recognition than a new job for them.

The new members join the current founding members:

We extend our gratitude to founding members Neal Caren, Tina Fetner, and Dan Hirschman, who are moving on after almost three years of service. Thank you!