For example, even when many of us hang around Academia.edu (sometimes, perhaps, just to to see if one or two people have googled us this week), yet we are often quite poor at sharing our work, even when there is no reason not to share it. Parallel publishing (different from publishing in an open access journal) should be a norm and not an exception.
Parallel archiving/publishing means that a person first publishes her article in a regular journal. After that, she archives the article as such (if the publisher allows it) or an earlier version of it in an open digital repository. The published article, or a version of it, becomes publicly available through the parallel publication while the scholarly references are still made to the publication in the scientific journal. The idea of parallel publication is that in an open repository it is accessible to everyone for free. Archiving your pre-print drafts also helps the publisher in different ways. This is something that the publishers these days understand, even if scholars have not yet caught up with the trend.
Here is a recent example of a parallel publication in the mentioned Academia.edu by Robin Douglass:
Note how Robin points out in this parallel publication that “This is a post-print version of the article and is not for citation. The published version is available at…”
This is a good point to be made regarding parallel publications for the sake of clarification. Also, one needs to check publisher policies regarding parallel publishing, these can be easily checked, for example, here:
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/index.php
Some people in the history of philosophy have of course always been tech-savvy and versed in the principles of open access and open science. Yet, I believe it is the time that all of us start making our research as publicly available as possible. This will not only benefit us as individual scholars, but also the field of scholarship that we represent.
Mandeville Scholarship
A very good example of a line of scholarship that should be taking full advantage of open access and open science is research on Bernard Mandeville that is close to my heart. Mandeville scholarship is a small, but growing field (compared for example to the David Hume Business). What I have been thinking for some time now is that Mandevilleans would benefit immensely of finding new relevant research on Mandeville from one open repository.
Luckily that open repository is at hand and it is called Zenodo. The great benefits of Zenodo is its easy-to-use interface, the possibility of saving multiple different kinds of works (not only articles), its direct link to Github (that might concern history of philosophy less at this point in time) and the chance of creating communities.
While writing this I created a community on Zenodo called “Bernard Mandeville Scholarship”.
http://zenodo.org/collection/user-mandeville
What you need to do now is to go to Zenodo, sign-up and start uploading parallel publications of your work, also unpublished drafts are good, as well as lectures etc. Every upload will also be marked with a DOI. If you use the following link, it will ensure that the uploaded record is added to Bernard Mandeville Scholarship community collection:
http://zenodo.org/deposit/?c=mandeville
Now, every time in the future you upload work related to Mandeville (old or new) in any possible form to Zenodo, just by noting that it is part of “Bernard Mandeville Scholarship” (or using the indicated link above), it can then be found by everyone together with other work on Mandeville by other people (given that they use the same community identifier when uploading it). Once the community starts growing (currently it is empty), we will also benefit of other websites harvesting Zenodo etc.
Thus, to repeat a little: if you are a Mandeville scholar or if you have done any work on Bernard Mandeville, sign up to Zenodo if you haven’t already. Upload your work on Zenodo and tag it as Bernard Mandeville Scholarship in the relevant field. Then tell a friend and ask them to start doing the same thing. This is what I will start doing as well – although I have most of my Mandeville publications archived as parallel publications elsewhere, the only thing that I have uploaded to Zenodo so far is one fleeting lecture. But this is to say that it is not too late for you either. And to underline the good part of Zenodo: it is not only for archiving publications, also other forms of relevant scholarship, even slides from your Mandeville presentations, are just as important.
If people deposit also their earlier work (all those gems from the 1970s onwards), soon we will have created with minimal effort a very useful repository for Mandeville scholarship. It couldn’t be any easier. At the same time, we move quickly beyond just listing and linking things related to Mandeville (although one very good form of documentation to have on Bernard Mandeville Scholarship on Zenodo is different lists as well, Irwin Primer has been very prolific in this lately). Hopefully, sooner than later we will have a significant body of work to be found from one repository shared openly and freely with everyone with internet access anywhere in the world. To me it seems that necessary steps for having more impact as a group and a community of Mandevilleans could not have been made any easier.
PS This blog post was written as part of my paper for Mandeville in Riga symposium, 8.-10.10.2015. In my paper I will suggest a collaborative authorship project for writing about contemporary relevance of Mandeville. More updates on that to follow later, if it takes off.