socarxiv is launched

Over the summer, SocArXiv announced its development. What is SocArXiv, you ask? It’s a free, open source, open access depository for prepublication versions of papers — a way to get your work out there faster, and to more people. Think SSRN or Academia or ResearchGate, but not-for-profit (SSRN is now owned by Elsevier) and fundamentally committed to accessibility.

Today, a beta version of SocArXiv has launched.

SocArXiv has had the great fortune to partner with the Center for Open Science, the folks who brought you the Reproducibility Project. Because COS was already working on building infrastructure, SocArXiv was quickly able to put up a temporary drop site for papers. (Full disclosure: I’m on the SocArXiv steering committee.)

Just on the basis of that, more than 500 papers have been deposited and downloaded over 10,000 times. Now a permanent site is up, and we will be working to get the word out and encourage sociologists and other social scientists to make the jump. With financial support from the Open Society Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, this thing is looking pretty real.

More developments will be coming in the months ahead. We’ve partnered with the LSE’s International Inequalities Institute to establish our first working paper series, and will be spearheading an outreach effort to academics, as well as continuing to develop additional features. I will doubtless be highlighting some of those here.

In the meanwhile, take a look, and add a paper of your own. It’s quick and painless, and will help you make your work quickly accessible while contributing to the development of open science infrastructure.

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