In November 2025, we paused new submissions about AI topics. For about three months, we turned away papers about AI models, testing AI models, proposing AI models, theories about the future of AI and so on. We accepted some empirical social science research about AI in society on a case-by-case basis. The purpose of this pause was to ease pressure on our moderators and encourage AI-oriented authors to find other ways of distributing their work — and give us time to craft a policy.
The research and drafting of this policy was done by a subcommittee of our moderation team and steering committee. They were: Alex Hanna, Rebecca Kennison, Sam Koreman, Pamela Oliver, and myself (Philip Cohen). Then we discussed the proposed policy among the full team and committee, and made additional revisions.
We want a policy that will help us protect the epistemic commons from slop that dilutes our work, without spending too much time on each paper. We want to balance the needs and interests of scholars who rely on a more reliable research ecosystem (whether they post papers with us or not), moderators who have to face the queue of papers each day, and the many independent researchers who want to meet scholarly standards with their work but need guidance to do so. We are not trying to monopolize social science research dissemination, and are happy to turn away work that can be more comfortable somewhere else (like aiXiv, which accepts work produced by large language models).
We feel the need to express our humanity in this process. We insist on making human judgments, using our perception, judgment, and experience – and will not defer to automated systems, or enter into a technological arms race to defeat the (people who run the) machines. We strive for fairness, but make no promise of an algorithmically pure policy.
We hope this policy will help us meet our goals, which include disseminating valuable research better and faster, helping scholars understand what types of work that are unacceptable, keeping out fraudulent research and reducing the volume of LLM-generated content, reducing moderation burden, and encouraging honest disclosure of tools and methods.
Because of how quickly things are changing, we expect to revisit this policy periodically. We welcome your feedback, and will do our best to handle appeals.
Detail from AI-generated art using the prompt “bad paper” with Wombo.
Two recent incidents at SocArXiv prompted the Steering Committee to offer some comment on our process and its outcomes.
Ivermectin research
On May 4, 2021, our moderators accepted a paper titled, “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 a group of authors from the Mexican Social Security Institute, Ministry of Health in Mexico City, and Digital Agency for Public Innovation in Mexico City. The paper reports on a “quasi-experimental” analysis purporting to find “significant reduction in hospitalizations among [COVID-19] patients who received [a] ivermectin-based medical kit” in Mexico City. The paper is a “preprint” insofar as the paper was not peer reviewed or published in a peer-reviewed journal at the time it was submitted, but because it has not subsequently been published in such a venue, it is really just a “paper.” (We call all the papers on SocArXiv “papers,” and let authors describe their status themselves, either on the title page, or by linking to a version published somewhere else.)
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).
This has prompted us to clarify that our moderation process does not involve peer review, or substantive evaluation, of the research papers that we host. From our Frequently Asked Questions page:
Papers are moderated before they appear on SocArXiv, a process we expect to take less than two days. Our policy involves a six-point checklist, confirming 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 (such as PDF or docx). In addition, we seek to accept only papers that authors have the right to share, although we do not check copyrights in the moderation process. For details, view the moderation policy.
Posting a paper on SocArXiv is not in itself an indication of good quality. We host many papers of top quality – and their inclusion in SocArXiv is a measure of good practice. But there are bad papers as well, and the system does not explicitly differentiate them for readers. In addition to not verifying the quality of the papers we host, we also don’t evaluate the supporting materials authors provide. In the case of the ivermectin paper, the authors declared that their data is publicly available with a link to a Google sheet (as well as a Github repository that is no longer available). They also declared no conflict of interest.
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.
Fraudulent papers
To our knowledge, the ivermectin paper is not fraudulent. However, we do not verify the identities of authors who submit papers. The submitting author must have an account on the Open Science Framework, our host platform, but getting an OSF account just requires a working email address. OSF users can enter ORCID or social media account handles on their profiles, but to our knowledge these are not verified by OSF. OSF does allow logins with ORCID or institutional identities, but as moderators at SocArXiv we don’t have a way of knowing how a user has created their account or logged in. Our submission process requires authors to affirm that they have permission to post the paper, but we don’t independently verify the connections between authors.
In short, both OSF and SocArXiv are vulnerable to people posting work that is not their own, or using fake identities. The unvarnished truth is that we don’t have the resources of the government, the coercive power of an employer, or the capital of a big company necessary to police this issue.
Recently, someone posted one fraudulent paper on SocArXiv, and attempted to post another, before we detected the fraud in our moderation process. The papers submitted listed a common author, but different (apparently) fake co-authors. In one case, we contacted the listed co-author (a real person) who confirmed that they were not aware of the paper and had not consented to its being posted. With a little research, we found papers under the name of this author at SSRN, ResearchGate, arXiv, and Paperswithcode, which also seem to be fake. (We reported this to the administrators of OSF, who deleted the related accounts.)
It did not appear that these papers had any important content, but rather just existed to be papers, maybe to establish someone’s fake identity, test AI algorithms or security systems, or whatever. Their existence doesn’t hurt real researchers much, but they could be part of either a specific plan that would be more harmful, or a general degradation of the research communication ecosystem.
With regard to this kind of fraud, we do not have a consistently applied defense in our moderation workflow. If we suspect foul play, we poke around and then reject the papers and report it if we find something bad. But, again, we don’t have the resources to fully prevent this happening. However, we are developing a new policy that will require all papers to have at least one author linked to a real ORCID account. Although this will add time to the moderation process of each paper (since OSF does not attach ORCIDs to specific papers), we plan to experiment with this approach to see if it helps without adding too much time and effort. (As always, we are looking for more volunteer moderators — just contact us!)
User responses
We do offer several ways for readers to communicate to us and to each other about the quality of papers on our system. Readers may annotate or comment on papers using the Hypothesis tool, or they may endorse papers using the Plaudit button. (Both of these are free with registration, using ORCID for identification.) If you read a paper you believe is good, just click the Plaudit button — that will tell future readers that you have endorsed it. Neither of these tools generates automatic notifications to SocArXiv or to the authors, however — they just communicate to the next reader. If you see something that you suspect is fraudulent or harmful, feel free to email us directly at socarxiv@gmail.com.
We encourage readers to take advantage of these affordances. And we are open to suggestions.
When you upload your conference paper, you give your audience the opportunity to engage with your work more seriously: read the paper, study the research materials you attach to it, and cite it — giving you formal precedence for your work and increasing its reach and impact. Later, if you publish it in a journal or some other venue, you can post a new version and people using the link will automatically be directed to the latest version (and see a link to the journal version, if there is one).
In addition, for the conference itself, you can use tags when you upload your paper to create communities of scholarship. Give it the ASA2021 tag for the American Sociological Association conference, for example. Then people can browse all the open uploaded conference papers as they prepare the schedules, at this link: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/discover?q=tags%3A(%22ASA2021%22).
(To make your own tag link, just go to SocArXiv.org, enter tags:("your tag") in the search bar, and copy the URL on the results page.)
If you give out a link directly to your paper, or a tag to your panel session, before the conference, you encourage a deeper level of engagement during your session, and your signal your embrace of transparent and accountable social science. (You can also upload your slides in the associated project if you want to share those.) Then, share a link directly to your paper, or all the papers, at the session itself.
Scholarship communities
Beyond one conference, this simple tagging allows for relatively spontaneous grouping of scholarship, as when someone says, “We need to organize the recent work on police violence,” and people start uploading and tagging their work. But it just as well facilitates more organized efforts. Just as such groupings use Twitter hashtags to pull people together, we can do the same thing with scholarship using SocArxiv. Groups that might benefit from this tool include:
Working groups on a research topic
Panels for an upcoming conference
Departments or groups within departments
Sections of the American Sociological Association or others
Scholar-activist groups
Any such group can simply share the instructions above and notify participants of the associated tag. The link to the tag will always generate a web page listing the associated papers.
This simple functionality is already very powerful, but we are always looking for ways to improve it and offer more options. People trying it out now will help with this development process. We hope you’ll try it out.
Don’t wait for your association to act
Yes, it would be better if the American Sociological Association (or other lagging associations) would provide SocArXiv’s level of service to conference participants, with archiving, DOIs, permanent links, versioning, commenting, and supporting materials. But you don’t have to wait for them to catch up. We provide this for free thanks to support from the University of Maryland Libraries, the nonprofit Center for Open Science, and the volunteers who work on our service.
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.
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
As SocArXiv approaches 5000 papers (there are 4895 at this moment), here is a snapshot of the disciplines represented on our server:
Sociology accounts for one-third of our papers. The original steering committee group consisted of sociologists and library leaders, and much of our outreach was in sociology, so that is not surprising. In addition, there are other paper servers active in other areas. Nevertheless, we are happy to have this diversity, and welcome papers from all the fields we cover — social sciences, arts and humanities, education, and law.
Within the field of sociology, we have a wide representation across subfields. Here note we use the categories generated by the American Sociological Association’s list of sections:
In honor of the American Sociological Association annual meeting, which starts on Saturday, I’m highlighting a handful of SocArXiv papers that will be presented at the conference. Their time/location is noted below as well. If you’ve just shared an ASA paper of your own with your discussant (and if you haven’t, time to get moving), consider uploading it to SocArXiv as well. You can always update it with a revised version later.
A related note—as I’ve been collating these the past few months, I’ve been noticing a pretty heavy gender imbalance in my selections, even though I’ve been paying attention. At first I thought it was my subfield tastes or implicit bias, but looking more closely, the pool itself is quite male-dominated—certainly more so than the discipline as a whole. So women in particular, please consider sharing your papers!
And last point—a few days ago I noticed that a version of a SocArXiv paper by Penn State demographer Alexis Santos-Lozada and colleague Jeffrey T. Howard on excess deaths in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, was just published in JAMA. Santos-Lozada’s research was highlighted here last month pre-publication. Congratulations—it’s important work.
Standard disclaimer: I make no claim to peer review or formal evaluation of the papers here. Read it yourself before you cite.
Section on Economic Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session
Mon, August 13, 4:30 to 5:30pm, Pennsylvania Convention Center, Level 100, 113A
This very interesting paper links econ soc with the sociological literature on disasters to understand how experience of a stock market crash causes households to shift their 401(k) investments toward long-term conservatism. This is consistent with neither neoclassical or behavioral economic predictions, but fits predictions regarding the social amplification of risk. Unfortunately, this social reaction may not bode well for retirement savers in the long run—not a good sign as bankruptcy rises among older Americans.
Sat, August 11, 10:30am to 12:10pm, Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, Level 4, Franklin Hall 7
ASA’s theme this year is “Feeling Race”, and this paper on Christian nationalism and attitudes about police mistreatment of blacks is certainly relevant. Drawing on a national probability sample, it shows a relationship between Christian nationalism, measured by agreement with statements like “The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation,” and beliefs about differences in how U.S. police officers treat blacks and whites. There is a strong relationship between Christian nationalism and believing the police treat people of all races similarly, unsurprisingly, but with some unexpected twists: the relationship declines with increasing religious activity, and it holds for nonwhite Christian nationalists as well as white ones.
Sat, August 11, 4:30 to 6:10pm, Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, Level 4, Franklin Hall 4
Much of the conversation around diversity—certainly the legal conversation around affirmative action—is grounded in the idea that diversity is beneficial for everyone in an organization. In terms of organizational capacity, the working assumption is usually that of a tradeoff between better coordination (with homogeneity) or more creative problem-solving (with diversity). This paper shifts that conversation by examining intrapersonal diversity—having individuals with more internally heterogenous beliefs. Drawing on data from Glassdoor, the paper argues that interpersonal heterogeneity worsens organizational coordination, while intrapersonal heterogeneity facilitates creativity. An interesting angle with implications for debates over the effects of diversity from Google to higher ed.
Section on Sociology of Education Refereed Roundtable Session
Sun, August 12, 2:30 to 3:30pm, Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, Level 5, Salon H
Finally, Dockendorff and Geist survey a pool of American undergraduates to better understand the experiences of trans and nonbinary students, particularly focusing on students who report others perceiving them as androgynous or of a different gender than they perceive themselves, finding higher levels of self-reported marginalization among those who identify “beyond the binary”. The paper makes innovations in gender measurement as well as exploring student experiences around gender marginalization in new ways.
Enjoy the remaining days of summer, whether you’re heading to ASA in Philly, lounging by the beach, or just heading to the office.
Once again it’s time for monthly highlights from SocArXiv, aka Stuff Beth Thought Was Interesting. This month we’ve got an eclectic set of papers with no unifying theme, other than being uploaded to SocArXiv in the last month. As usual, I remind you that SocArXiv papers are not necessarily peer-reviewed, so use judgment when you read.
In the craziness of political life these days, disasters fall off the radar way too quickly. But we still don’t know how many people died in Puerto Rico as a result of the hurricane last fall. The official death toll is still 64. But a number of scholars have been working to provide better estimates of the real impact of the tragedy. Another widely reported estimate, based on house-to-house survey data, produced a figure of 4600. Now this paper by Santos-Lozada, comparing death records from last year to historical averages for the three-month period following the hurricane, suggests a number around 900. Debate over the true number will continue, but this is a great example of the kind of paper that needs to get out there quickly, rather than lingering hidden in peer review.
Well, this is right up my alley. A large and growing literature examines how states make populations “legible” through censuses, mapmaking, data collection and so on. But it’s also clear that states use ambiguity—in laws, definitions, policies—in productive ways. This paper uses the historical case of the U.S. colonization of the Philippines to show how the institutionalization of ambiguity can resolve imperial conflicts. After the U.S. took the Philippines in the Spanish-American War, debates about what their status should be—a colony? an eventual U.S. state?—were resolved by creating ambiguous categories: the territory would be “foreign in a domestic sense” (according to the Supreme Court), and their residents neither citizens nor aliens. The paper goes on to explore how this institutionalized ambiguity helped the U.S. resolve competing, and contradictory, demands that it remain true to the Constitution while presenting Filipinos, perceived as racially inferior, from accessing the rights of citizens.
Addendum: I just noticed this paper just won the grad student paper award in political sociology, and an honorable mention for the comparative-historical grad award. See, I have good taste!
How do we understand inequality? This interesting theoretical paper argues that if people’s informal theories of inequality shape their political views, we need to take more seriously the task of understanding where those theories come from. The paper suggests we do that by conceptualizing inequality beliefs as inference problems – that ordinary people look for theories that explain their everyday experiences and observations of inequality. Personally, I wouldn’t discount the extent to which we learn our theories explicitly from those around us, as well as inferring them from experience, but this is still an intriguing way to conceptualize a challenging problem.
Stuart Geiger, Charlotte Mazel-Cabasse, Chihoko Cullens, Laura Norén, Brittany Fiore-Gartland, Diya Das, and Henry Brady
Ready to ditch sociology entirely? How about a career in the growing field of data science? This report on three major data science institutes—at Berkeley, NYU, and the University of Washington—explains what data science is, what academic data scientists do, and presents interesting interview data on the career paths of early-career data scientists. If you think you might be a data scientist, or would like to be, this report is definitely worth a read.
Okay, that’s it for this month’s SocArXiv update. If you’re in the northeastern U.S., hope you’re staying cool.
Among the many interesting papers posted to SocArXiv this month, this I’m highlighting four that circle around a loose theme: education organizations. All four this month are not-yet-published drafts, including three working papers and a very interesting dissertation chapter. As always, these are papers that caught my eye but they are not peer-reviewed; read them yourself before citing.
Okay, I’ll admit I was grabbed by the title. Love the concept or hate it, we usually associate “performativity” with economics or finance, at least since Donald MacKenzie’s work. But of course the old Thomas theorem—“If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences”—applies to our understanding of the world more generally. So why not the performativity of org theory? Many innovative or experimental organizations are grounded in theories, academic or otherwise, about what accounts for organizational success. In the case at hand, No Excuses charter schools were founded based on a theory that strong leaders could create organizational cultures that would produce educational success for disadvantaged students. This ethnographic case study of one No Excuses school explores how leadership attempted to implement their theory and reacted when the theory did not quite perform in the way it expected.
This intriguing paper, also ethnographic, reports on the development of edX, a MOOC platform started in 2012 as a nonprofit collaboration between Harvard and MIT. edX began as an educational organization—it saw itself as linking faculty and TAs with software developers and students—but eventually became a platform for other organizations to use, adopting the slogan “We do software so that you can do education.” In the process, edX had to create a new division of labor in which it did software development (internally framed as “boring”), while instructors at partner institutions would do the “interesting” work of content creation. Yet the supposedly neutral role of platform design still had huge pedagogical implications, even as edX came to distinguish what it did as an organization from “education”. The paper concludes by arguing that understanding platforms requires attending not just to “licenses, legal arrangements, and calculative agencies, but also to the shaping of organizational roles within the eco-system.”
This new working paper from Cottom and colleagues reports on a social network analysis of a dataset involving the career histories and education of presidents of Association of Public & Land-grant Universities (APLU) members, including a number of HBCUs, and a smaller sample of for-profit institutions. Presidents of predominantly white APLU institutions are tightly networked, while for-profit institutions and HBCUs are marginal to the network; the institutions with the highest degree centrality are Purdue, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas A&M—an observation that makes Purdue’s recent experiments with purchase of the for-profit Kaplan to run its online classes all the more interesting.
Last but not least, this historical case study of Stanford’s postwar expansion of graduate science and engineering education engages the longstanding “credential society” literature by advocating for greater attention to the role of the state. While credentialing theory gives credit to educational entrepreneurs and the status projects of occupational groups in driving the expansion of credential-producing programs, this paper points to the fundamental role of the state in this process—through massive government patronage that schools like Stanford entrepreneurially tapped into to drive their own credentialing contributions.
This is self-evidently true for the fields that benefited from the federal government’s massive Cold War expansion of science funding, but struck another chord with me as well, as I recently revised a draft chapter on the origins of public policy schools. Policy schools, which only got started in the late 1960s, were themselves an entrepreneurial response on the part of universities to the massive demand for RAND-style analysis produced by federal rollout of the Planning-Programming-Budgeting System in 1965—making them another, very distinct case in which educational entrepreneurship could be better described as academic statecraft.
Okay, that’s it for this round. Interested in highlighting papers closer to your own interests? Shoot us an email at socarxiv@gmail.com. In the meanwhile, keep those papers coming!
Welcome back for a second round of monthly SocArXiv highlights. This is a way to call out a handful of the many papers that were posted in April, focusing mostly and sociology and reflecting my totally idiosyncratic tastes. Some are working papers or forthcoming articles; some are preprints of recently published work. All are freely available via OSF.
Disclaimer: I make no claim to peer review or to evaluation of the papers here. Read it yourself before you cite!
This paper, which lies at the intersection of social studies of finance and institutionalism/field theory, is a fascinating look at how the adoption of fair value accounting by the Financial Accounting Standards Board affected the financial modeling practices used by banks. Consistent with MacKenzie (2011), the paper finds competing and conflicting valuation processes within and across organizations, and that the new standards tipped the balance in favor of a set of practices aligned with financial economics. The paper does a really nice job of showing how institutional and sociomaterial explanations can be complementary, and that both are needed to understand this kind of change.
This paper was published in ASR last year, but it went up on SocArXiv this month, so fair game. Maggie Frye does great and original work linking cultural accounts and demographic data. By moving between empirical evidence on sexual behavior and school-leaving, and student/teacher accounts of why sexual relationships cause girls to leave school, Frye produces a compelling account of how causal narratives — even inaccurate ones — influence actions in ways that have population-level effects.
Thijs Bol, Mathijs de Vaan, and Arnout van de Rijt
The findings of these two papers may not be shocking, but both provide important new evidence of the effects they describe. The King et al. paper, published in Socius last year, shows that men cite their own work 70% more than women, and that these numbers have not changed over the last fifty years. The Bol et al. paper, published this year in PNAS, shows that early career researchers just above the funding threshold of a major European grant accumulate twice as much funding over the next eight years as those just below it. The practical takeaway, though, is that part of the gap happens because initially unfunded applicants subsequently apply for fewer grants, not only because successful applicants are more likely to be funded down the road. So women, cite your own work, and rejected grant applicants, keep on trying.
Just yesterday a graduate student asked me if anyone had looked at whether Lauren Rivera’s finding about the cultural matching that goes on at elite firms applies to other occupational settings. I said I didn’t know of work that did (though tell me if I’m wrong!), and then I ran into this paper, forthcoming in the British Journal of Sociology. While it doesn’t look at matching per se, it does examine whether cultural consumption predicts future earnings, upward social mobility, and promotions. (Answer: yes.) This seems like an area that is ripe for interesting work and where relationships are likely to vary a great deal across industry, occupation, and location.
Okay, that’s it for this time. Keep on posting your working papers and preprints to SocArXiv and I’ll keep on sharing — at least as much as I can.
If you’ve submitted a paper to be considered for an American Sociological Association section award – including a graduate student award – consider submitting it to SocArXiv as well. Any paper that is uploaded to SocArXiv by April 30 and wins a 2018 ASA section award will, upon letting us know, receive a supplementary SOAR (Sociology Open Access Recognition) award of $250 in recognition of your achievement. Support open access, gain recognition, and win money all at the same time!
Here’s how it works: You upload your paper to SocArXiv by April 30. If it’s a published paper, check your author agreement or the Sherpa/ROMEO database to see what version, if any, you’re allowed to share. 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, 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
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, 2018 that your paper has won an ASA section award.
What if I upload my paper after I win the section award?
Any papers uploaded by April 30, 2018 are eligible. We welcome later sharing of papers, but they will not be eligible for SOAR awards.
Does the version submitted to SocArXiv have to be identical with the version submitted to the ASA section?
The versions must be reasonably similar but do not need to be identical. 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.
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 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 your rights to your work.
I am a graduate student submitting a paper for a graduate student section award. Am I still eligible?
Yes, absolutely. ASA section awards for graduate student papers are also eligible for SOAR.
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.
SocOpen: Home of SocArXiv 