Preprint alternative to ERIC

Via Ben Amata: “A colleague offered this non-government source as an alternative. EdArXiv: a preprint server for the education research community. Education researchers now have their own community developed preprint service! EdArXiv (Education Archive) is a free, open source, non-profit service that allows researchers to post and search working papers, unpublished work, conference materials, and articles under review (preprints). Why EdArXiv? As explained previously in a post about preprints in other research fields, preprints: ● Increase the visibility of research, and sooner. While traditional papers can languish in the peer review process for months, even years, a preprint is live the minute it is submitted and moderated. This means your work gets indexed by Google Scholar and Altmetric, and discovered by more relevant readers than ever before. ● Allow for feedback on your work and for you to make improvements prior to journal submission. Many authors have publicly commented about the recommendations for improvements they’ve received on their preprint that strengthened their work and even led to finding new collaborators. ● Increase citation of the final paper. Papers with an accompanying preprint get cited 30% more often than papers without. This research from PeerJ sums it up, but that’s a big benefit for scholars looking to get more visibility and impact from their efforts. ● Get a permanent DOI, which makes them part of the freely accessible scientific record forever. This means others can rely on that permanence when citing your work in their research. It also means that your idea, developed by you, has a “stake in the ground” where potential scooping and intellectual theft are concerned…”

“As we can no longer depend on ERIC having the most recent materials, an alternative that might be useful is EdArXiv which is the OSF site for Education! pre-prints. It can’t replace what ERIC has lost, but it can work for searching for materials that normally would be included in ERIC. It’s not as inclusive as ERIC, but with more researchers aware of EdArXiv, and OSF in general, we might see more materials being added. OSF is a platform of the Center or Open Science.