Archiving feminist research as a method of preserving integrity and openness | GenderIT.org

"I often find that my work is plagiarised or otherwise used in unethical ways with nary a footnote or attribution to me. Not only are such practices unethical, they also invisibilise feminists and their contributions, knowledge and creativity in the exact form that it was released to the world. There is a possibility that these practices create a perception that I plagiarised from or built upon the ideas, unattributed, of those who, in reality, plagiarised from me. Therefore, it is even more imperative to record, publish and disseminate my work in ways that maintain its integrity, credibility and veracity, and in turn, my reputation as a researcher. If necessary, I want to be able to conclusively prove that it is my own work, which I created and published before the plagiarised or unattributed work appeared.

I save a copy of all my published work on the Internet Archive. The Wayback Machine through the tool Wayback Changes allows making a comparison between different versions of an archived web page, in case it changes. A few other freely available tools allow page comparison of content in different online archives.

This has saved my work from being lost. For example, recently, I found that a website where one of my articles was published had suffered a technical glitch because of which its text had become unreadable. While I requested the website admin to fix it, I was still able to reference and instantly share a perfectly readable copy of my article from the Internet Archive...."