Open Access Week: Self-Archiving Authors

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, this week I plan to highlight some of the concrete steps that forced migration authors take to provide Open Access (OA) to their scholarly journal articles.

First, do they deposit eprints of their journal articles in open access repositories? (Also referred to as self-archiving or "green OA." If you are not familiar with these concepts, you can learn more about them on my OA blog.)

The answer is some definitely do, as can be seen below.

Self-archiving trends observed on this blog:

I counted up self-archived eprints that I referenced on Forced Migration Current Awareness during 2015; the total came to 60. (The last time I did this was 2012; back then, I came up with a total of 32 eprints.)  Of the 60, 25 were postprints and 35 were preprints.

This is a breakdown of where the eprints were deposited:
- Institutional repositories (IRs) = 22
- SSRN = 22
- Academia.edu = 9
- ResearchGate = 6
- Personal web sites = 1

Somewhat surprisingly, IRs turned out to be a relatively popular self-archiving location in 2015 (IRs have generally had a difficult time getting authors to deposit with them). In my small sample, SSRN was the most popular subject repository used for self-archiving eprints, although a majority of those eprints (21) were preprints rather than postprints. The reason for this is probably because many of these preprints will eventually be published in law reviews - most of which in turn are made freely available in full-text online. The academic social networking sites, Academia.edu and ResearchGate, are also increasingly popular places for authors to share their articles.

More recent examples of self-archived eprints and where they were deposited:

Univ. of Geneva's IR: "Conflicts of Interest in International Organizations: Evidence from Two United Nations Humanitarian Agencies," Public Administration, vol. 94, no. 2 (June 2016) [postprint]

Harvard's IR: "Refugee Education in Countries of First Asylum: Breaking Open the Black Box of Pre-resettlement Experiences," Theory and Research in Education, vol. 14, no. 2 (July 2016) [postprint]

ResearchGate: "The Social Impacts of Dams: A New Framework for Scholarly Analysis," Environmental Impact Assessment Review, vol. 60 (Sept. 2016) [preprint]

Academia.edu: "Territory, Procedures and Rights: Border Procedures in European Asylum Law," Refugee Survey Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 1 (March 2016) [preprint]

SSRN: "'Up to Now I Am Suffering': Justice, Sexual Violence and Disability amongst Refugees in Uganda," International Journal of Migration and Border Studies, vol. 1, no. 4 (2015) [preprint]

Your turn?

Are you interested in taking a concrete step to provide Open Access to your work through self-archiving? Use this guide written by Jørgen Carling to help you get started.

Tagged Publications and Web Sites/Tools.