G. Geltner and D. Smail
The authors are co-founders of BodoArxiv: Open Repository of Medieval Studies
Humanities scholars, including medievalists, are generally free from scientists’ imperative to “publish or perish.” We tend to value quality over quantity, are used to the slow pace of publication and low citation rates, and appreciate our works’ literary and artisanal quality. So why accelerate the process unnecessarily by uploading early (or un-formatted) work in the form of preprints to public, non-profit repositories like BodoArxiv? Here we discuss six reasons why we should consider doing so and why in part it’s already happening, sometimes in response to larger cultural shifts in and beyond academia.
Inclusivity
First, the term preprint covers a broad spectrum of scholarly works we all produce, not all of which take the form of traditional, peer-reviewed articles, book chapters or monographs. Encyclopedia entries, undergraduate theses and graduate seminar papers, contributions to exhibition catalogues, datasets, Web-GIS projects, archaeological reports, descriptions of digital humanities projects, and so forth, are still unequally represented in databases and are therefore hard to find, access and share. Legally uploading such diverse works to BodoArxiv, which supports numerous types of files, and is indexed by RI OPAC and Google, helps represent the field more accurately.
Preprint repositories’ inclusivity also means that any work uploaded receives a digital object identifier (DOI), even if it is not (yet, or ever) peer reviewed, or fits uneasily into existing sub-disciplines and their venues. BodoArxiv, for instance, houses any scholarly work that falls under the broad remit of medieval studies (including medievalism), regardless of its initial status, and supports updates to that work, also known as versioning. DOIs, moreover, are far stabler than URLs, the digital address currently favored by for-profit sites such as ResearchGate and Academia [dot] Edu. URLs are also the common choice of blogs, newsletters and other platforms used to showcase original works and scholarly innovations and provocations, which means that they cannot be stably archived. A preprint repository provides authors with a more durable option.
Findability and reporting
In many countries and institutions, humanities scholars operate in a research monitoring culture that is increasingly administered according to the norms of the natural sciences, and these fields have a strong preprint tradition. Preprint repositories like BodoArxiv are digitally indexed and generate a DOI for any uploaded item, at any state of its gestation. They thus offer humanities scholars too a way to report and represent their contributions in ways that research information systems like ORCID, PURE and Google Scholar can digest, and that funding bodies appreciate. This is especially true given that even major humanities journals are not properly indexed, which means that metadata about articles they publish (including citations) are poorly captured. Yet this type of visibility is becoming more important in a monitoring and evaluation culture with little room for interdisciplinary nuance, a culture, moreover, that privileges metrified and accessible digital data.
Cost-effectiveness
Many private and public funders now insist that all scholarship supported by grants be published in Open Access (OA), that is, unhindered by paywalls and registration. Some of them even earmark money or have special agreements with publishers to cover so-called article processing costs (APCs). Such fees, however, can be very costly in humanities terms, reaching upwards of $1500 per article, come directly at the expense of declining research budgets, and are unobtainable for most independent scholars and teaching institutions. A convenient way to avoid such fees entirely is by uploading an authorized preprint to a repository such as BodoArxiv, for free, and enjoying its indexing capacities, which are often better than those of institutional repositories and many humanities journals.
Interdisciplinary work
The benefits of interdisciplinary research apply differently to different subfields in the humanities, including medieval studies. Yet they have become increasingly prominent, be it in digital humanities, medical history, environmental studies, manuscript studies and economic history. The act of collaborating with scholars from other disciplines, however, requires considering different forms of scholarly communications. A multidisciplinary team whose members decide to publish in a historical journal, for example, may alleviate any concerns that their scientific collaborators may have about visibility, access and turnover by uploading a preprint of an article as it winds through the peer-review and production processes. The flexibility of preprints also allows individuals within such teams to represent the particular value of a work to different audiences in ways that the chosen venue might not.
Early career scholars
While some humanities scholars can afford to wait many months and even years to see their work published in a prestigious journal, many cannot. This is especially true for advanced PhD students and early career scholars, who regularly face a decision between publishing in a reputable venue and having something to show sooner to hiring, tenure or funding panels. Here, too, preprints offer a reliable and flexible option that provides evaluators with hard evidence for productivity and engagement, beyond what is gestured by the words “submitted” or “forthcoming” placed on a CV. Moreover, BodoArxiv and its sister repositories facilitate the versioning of preprints, so that authors can easily update the status of their manuscript or upload newer versions.
Access and communication
Finally, we should recognize that many scholars want to be able to share work, be it their own or research they’ve discovered, easily and instantly across teaching, research and social media platforms. A global exchange of ideas is easier with preprints, which do not hide behind paywalls or involve registration, can be searched and found from a single site, and have stable DOIs that can be linked and updated. And what is true for academic scholars is even more pertinent among policy makers, governments and the general, non-academic public seeking to educate themselves.
In sum, there are unique benefits for humanities scholars to upload works onto a preprint repository, especially when it is a real non-profit service.