Open Access in Philosophy

"The Open Access movement promotes free access to academic articles and books through the web. This can be done by uploading texts that have been published in a traditional paper journal (‘green OA’) or by publishing in open access journals (‘golden OA’) like Philosophers' Imprint or Ergo (which are, of course, refereed like other journals too). It would be great if many of the established journals became open access journals, but this is not required for achieving open access. Do This Upload (‘post’, ‘self-archive’) all your publications to an open access repository. You can find one through DOAR or ROAR. There is likely to be one at your institution. Or use Sammelpunkt, which all philosophers can use. A repository is a much more suitable place for your articles than your homepage or social networks like Academia.edu. Reasons: Open access repositories use special (OAI) metadata, therefore the content is not only found by general search engines but also by special open access search engines like OAIster and BASE. In an open access repository every text is assigned a long term stable URL. Long term storage is secured. The date of the uploading is stored, with this you can prove the priority of your idea. When? If you did not sign any agreement with the journal, you are allowed to post the article 12 months after publication. The same is true for articles in edited books. Most agreements allow self-archiving after 12 months, only some allow it only after 24 months, e.g. MIND. Today no journal forbids self-archiving. (Please tell me if you find counter-examples!) What many do not know: It is possible and advisable to post an article already before one submits it (preprint), as it is customary, for example, in physics. (Even MIND allows that.) Only journals with the Ingelfinger rule refuse articles that have been posted already, but no philosophy journal uses that rule. 12 or 24 months after the publication you should then post the published version (postprint). On the page of the preprint in the repository there will be a link to the page of the postprint. On your homepage, make a list of all your publications with links to the entries in the repository. Before you upload an article, please format it suitably, i.e. please not double-spaced. Format it single-spaced, with adjusted margins, hyphenation, page numbers, with a readable serif font like Garamond, Cambria, or Palatino, lines no longer than 66 characters. Especially convenient is paper format A5 with font-size 11 pt. If you are not using PhilPapers yet, look at it and register, it is a magnificient platform. Make sure that all your articles are listed there. Most of them may already be there, because journals feed data into PhilPapers and PhilPapers crawls repositories. When you upload a preprint to a repository, create an entry in PhilPapers and add a link to the entry in the repository. Categorize all your texts carefully. Normally a text should be in only one, maximally three leaf categories. You can also upload files to PhilPapers, but there are some disadvantages of uploading there rather than to a normal repository (which uses the EPrints software): The content is not found with OA search engines like OAIster and BASE; it does not save the date of the uploading; it does not link different versions of an article with each other (so it does not put in the entry of the preprint version of an article a link to the postprint version) ..."