The Center for Open Science, MediArXiv, and BodoArXiv Launch Branded Preprint Services in the Humanities

MediArXiv is a free, community-led digital archive for media, film, and communication research. The mission of MediArXiv is to open up media, film, and communication research to a broader readership and to help build the future of scholarly communication. The collaboration between COS and MedArXiv will provide a non-profit platform for media, film, and communication scholars to upload their working papers, pre-prints, accepted manuscripts (post-prints), and published manuscripts. The service is open for articles, books, and book chapters. In the course of its developments, MediArXiv is working toward interoperability with other important open access scholarly platforms in the humanities and social sciences, such as Humanities Commons.

BodoArXiv, named after a Carolingian peasant made famous by historian Eileen Power (1889-1940), gathers scholarly literature in medieval studies across the disciplines. It provides an open, non-profit repository for papers at different stages of gestation, including works that may later find themselves in article form and/or behind a paywall. Anyone can access and download any item on BodoArXiv freely and immediately, in adherence to the basic tenants of the Open Access movement. Beyond helping authors make their scholarship more visible and discoverable, BodoArXiv fosters collaboration and mentoring as a platform that supports various forms of peer review.

MediArXiv and BodoArXiv are the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth community preprint services built on COS’s flagship platform, OSF, which helps researchers design and manage their research workflow, store their data, generate DOIs, and collaborate with colleagues. COS has leveraged the platform to help research communities in many disciplines discover new research as it happens and to receive quick feedback on their own research prior to publication. COS’s Preprints platform provides an easy, robust, and stable solution for organizations that want to launch their own preprints service. COS is currently supporting branded services in marine and earth sciences, psychology, social sciences, engineering, agriculture, imaging, paleontology, sports research, contemplative research, law, library and information science, nutrition, as well as national, multidisciplinary services in Indonesia, France, the Arab nations, and Africa.

Over 2.2 million preprints have been already indexed from a variety of sources and can be accessed by selecting a subject of interest, entering specific search terms, or browsing the preprints most recently added to the service. OSF Preprints uses SHARE to aggregate search results from a variety of other preprint providers like arXiv, bioRXiv, PeerJ, CogPrints and others into its archive. Preprint contributors are also encouraged to upload their supporting materials, if available.