As part of the Berlin Summer School in Social Sciences, I organized a workshop entitled “Open Access: Background and Tools for Early Career Researchers in Social Sciences.” The goal of the workshop was to introduce participants to open access publishing and present useful tools to make their publications available to a wider audience.

We addressed questions such as:

• What are the limitations of the closed publication system?
• What is OA publishing?
• What are the different types of OA publications?
• What are the available licenses for OA publications?
• What is the share of OA publications in the scientific literature and how is this changing over time?
• What sort of funding is available for OA publishing?

The workshop was structured around a 45 minute presentation punctuated by group discussions and exercises. 90 minutes were planned for the whole workshop.

This workshop was prepared as part of the Freies Wissen Fellowship sponsored by Wikimedia Deutschland, the Stifterverband, and the VolkswagenStiftung.

The contents of the workshop are under a CC BY 4.0 license. All the material of this workshop (the outline, the slides, and the bibliography) can be cloned or downloaded from GitHub.

Feel free to share and remix the material to create your own workshop.

Going through a peer-review process usually takes months if not years. At the end, if a paper makes it to publication, access will often be limited by publishers who impose a paywall on peer-reviewed articles.

Preprints allow authors to publish early research findings and to make them available to the entire world for free. The concept is simple: 1) you upload a paper to a public repository; 2) the paper goes through a moderation process that assesses the scientific character of the work; 3) the paper is made available online. These three steps are usually completed in a few hours. With preprints, authors can rapidly communicate valuable results and engage with a broader community of scholars.

Researchers are sometimes reluctant to publish their work as preprints for two reasons. First, they fear that their papers won’t be accepted by scholarly journals because preprints would violate the so-called Ingelfinger rule, i.e. their work would have been “published” before submission. Most journals however will accept to review and publish papers that are available as preprints. The SHERPA/RoMEO database catalogues journal policies regarding pre and postprints (accepted papers that incorporate reviewers’ comments). The vast majority of journals are listed as “yellow” or “green” in the database: they tolerate preprints (yellow) or pre and postprints (green).

Second, authors are worried that they might get scooped, that their work might be stolen by someone else who would get credits for their work. Yet, the experience of arXiv, the oldest preprint repository which publishes papers in mathematics, physics, and others, shows the exact opposite. Since its creation in 1991, the repository has helped prevent scooping by offering scholars the chance to put a publicly available timestamp on their work.^[1]

My first preprint

I have decided to make a paper available as preprint in the coming days. My idea is to simultaneously submit the paper to a peer-reviewed journal and upload it on a public repository. I first shared the concerns of many of my colleagues regarding scooping and the possible rejection of my work by editors. However, the more I learned about preprints, the more I felt confident that this was the right way to proceed.

Here is what I did. I first selected the journal to which I would like to submit my paper. I then checked how the journal was rated in SHERPA/RoMEO. It turned out to be a “yellow” journal: so far so good. Finally, to be absolutely sure that the preprint would not be a problem I contacted the editor of the journal and asked:

Dear Professor XX,

I’m interested in publishing in journal YY. I would like to ask: what is your preprint policy? Would you review a paper that has been uploaded to a public repository like SocArXiv?

Best wishes,

Philippe Joly

And the response came a few minutes after:

Dear Mr Joly,

Yes, we would have no problem with that.

Best,

Professor XX

I now feel very comfortable uploading the preprint on a repository. I will try to store my paper on SocArxiv, which is one of the first online preprint servers for the social sciences. While economists have a long experience with publicly available working papers, sociologists and political scientists have been more reluctant to join the movement. SocArXiv has been active since 2017 and is modelled on arXiv. Interestingly, the team at SocArXiv has partnered with the Center for Open Science and their preprint service is hosted by the Open Science Framework, which I have covered in another post.

1. Bourne PE, Polka JK, Vale RD, Kiley R (2017) Ten simple rules to consider regarding preprint submission. PLoS Comput Biol 13(5): e1005473.