<div dir="ltr"><div><div><div>Thanks so much for sharing that, Jean-Christophe! I look forward to reading it. And to cj for the alternative (though luckily I have institutional access).<br><br></div>Speaking of preprints, I wanted to note that the London School of Economics and Political Science has a preprint (and, depending on publisher rules, post-print) site where the article could be posted online: <a href="http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/" target="_blank">http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/</a> You may already have this in the works, Jean-Christophe. If not this page has the email where you can send your work and further details <a href="http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/faq.html" target="_blank">http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/faq.<wbr>html</a><br><br></div>I thought I'd email the whole group because I know folks aren't often aware that they have these opportunities available to them and because one of my earliest jobs was as a maintainer tasked with keeping the repository running and finding things to put in it. If you have such a repository, I encourage you to consider putting things in it when possible, as it's a service to those who don't feel comfortable using SciHub and who don't use ResearchGate, etc. Some of you have disciplinary repositories, like arXive and SSRN, which are great alternatives (well, ok now that SSRN is Elsevier-owned).<br></div><div><br></div><div>A little on the history of these projects, and of their maintainers. Based on visions from around 2003, that it would be helpful for those in disciplines without the arXiv to also have places to put their publications online -- a number of libraries started building these institutional repositories. When polled, a lot of faculty agreed because... I think we can all agree it's helpful to have freely-available copies of things online, whether the author's accepted manuscript or an actual copy from the journal.</div><div><br></div><div>The disconnect here was that university and library administrators and others who saw this expected that one could then rely on people to develop a habit of submitting their work to such repositories. So there was a flurry of building them, primarily from around 2005-2011, expecting that "if you build it, they will come." Certainly there was outreach, there were people tasked with metadata cleanup, there was a lot of work done selling benefits to the institution. Imagine if you could visit a single page on such a repository and see every publication put out by your Anthropology department in the last 5 years!</div><div><br></div><div>But that didn't happen.</div><div><br></div><div>The literature of "we're doing this!" transformed into the literature of "ok what's wrong?" Issues varied from poor software design and usability issues, administrator fears over accidentally violating copyright and thus complicating submission processes, researcher concerns about the quality of other things submitted to the repository and/or disciplinary disconnects with pre-print submission, and the sheer additional burden of figuring out what's necessary to deposit. Those with most robust pre-print cultures already had places like the arXiv and SSRN (now under publisher control) and had no need to put things in a second place.</div><div><br></div><div>Library workers were told to find ways to make submission easier. Hence the LSE repository linked above has an email address where you can send the info and the person or people receiving it are probably versed in all the rules around which copy you can use depending on publisher and may fill in the metadata and do all the work of actually putting it online. Other places mostly gave up on soliciting material and just kept the infrastructure up-to-date to prevent hacks.</div><div><br></div><div>Other places charged library workers with the mind-numbing task of finding out what people at their institution are publishing and just putting the work in the repository (this can generally be done without contact the author or with contacting them with an FYI if the policies are in place). These positions are often filled by librarians fresh from graduate school who have the job of looking for announcements of new publications, searching journal indexers, even looking through CVs. This was my first post-graduate position.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Salo's "Innkeeper at the Roach Motel" is perhaps the best take on this whole story <a href="https://minds.wisconsin.edu/handle/1793/22088">https://minds.wisconsin.edu/handle/1793/22088</a> with her far more biting take of shiny initiatives and mismanagement in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication: <a href="https://jlsc-pub.org/articles/abstract/10.7710/2162-3309.1075/">https://jlsc-pub.org/articles/abstract/10.7710/2162-3309.1075/</a> If you read Salo's work, you can catch the undercurrent of the
emotional
harm done to these workers and how it affects them. I admire her for leaving that vulnerability in her writing.<br></div><div><br>My own piece in the JLSC attempted to get a more quantitative look at it, which I wrote primarily so that the people in the situations Salo describes would have the data to understand that it's really not just them. When you're in a position like this, you really need to know that it's not just something wrong with you or your institution. The few places where this has gone "successfully," put in infrastructures which tie it to promotion and tenure and have some form of OA mandate, but a great deal of labor (generally made invisible) goes into ensuring the information submitted by faculty gets transformed into something which can go in repositories <a href="https://jlsc-pub.org/articles/abstract/10.7710/2162-3309.2203/">https://jlsc-pub.org/articles/abstract/10.7710/2162-3309.2203/</a><br></div><div><br></div><div>I admit I'm sharing the story partly because I hope that making it a narrative vs. just encouraging deposit will mean that it stays in your imagination when you think about sharing your work and where you can put it. Not all of you will have such repositories, of course, but many people I talk to about them are surprised to learn they have one. And while I'm not in that business any more, new librarians on the job market will take more of these positions over the summer and find themselves in this strange world where they're tasked with filling in for the gap between aspiration and practice. I want more people to know that story. <br></div><div><br></div><div>And I want you to know that if you volunteer your work to one of these, you'll (probably) cause some maintainer somewhere to have a really good day. You'll give them a day where they know their work is actually sometimes visible. That someone knows that they're making things available online. <br></div><div><br></div><div>If you've made it this far, thanks for reading.</div><div>Ruth<br></div></div>