Just as with science, the world of academic publishing is full of cause and effects. We had a recent blog post regarding ResearchGate and whether or not science and social media can coexist. This rise in academic social media presence and a desire to share material has led to more questions about what work can be posted and when. It seems this desire to share has been filled, at least partially, by the rise of institutional repositories and pre-print servers.
A distinction between the two is often difficult to make. In general, institutional repositories are broader and concerned with cataloguing all intellectual property output from a specific institution. This often goes beyond just academic papers to include things such as videos, 3D works, etc. Pre-print servers, such as arXiv, are concerned solely with allowing access to working papers after a quick screening process. As perfectly described in a 2017 Scholarly Kitchen article, the distinction becomes even more muddied when you factor in publishing’s open access movement as well. All this is to say things are changing and policies need to evolve to reflect these changes.
A recent webinar conducted by the Society for Scholarly Publishing focused on just this. Speaker Kenny Whitebloom from Penn Libraries noted the biggest problems moving forward, namely the lack of specific self-archiving policies and inconsistent, nonstandard language among those policies that do exist. Andrew Wible from Wolters Kluwer gave details of a recent initiative to gather and standardize existing policies. Perhaps the two most prominent reasons that standardized policies are needed are the media picking up faulty information through preprints and potential copyright infringements.
As a member of the academic publishing sphere, it is our job to stay on top of and ahead of these trends. I, for one, am excited to see which publishers do the same with regard to evolving repository policies.
