Working Papers, Open Access, and Cyber-infrastructure in Classical Studies

Princeton–Stanford Working Papers in Classics is a web-based series of work-in-progress scripts by members of two leading departments of classics. It introduces the humanities to a new form of scholarly communication and represents a major advance in the free availability of classical-studies scholarship in cyberspace. This article both reviews the initial performance of this open-access experiment and the benefits and challenges of working papers more generally for classical studies. After two years of operation Princeton–Stanford Working Papers in Classics has proven to be a clear success. This series has built up a large international readership and a sizeable body of preprints and performs important scholarly and community-outreach functions. As this performance is largely due to its congruency with the working arrangements of ancient historians and classicists and the global demand for open-access scholarship, the series confirms the viability of this means of scholarly communication and the likelihood of its expansion in our discipline. But modifications are required to increase the benefits this series brings and the amount of scholarship it makes freely available online. Finally departments wishing to replicate its success will have to consider other important developments, such as the increasing availability of postprints, the linking of research funding to open access, and the emergence of new cyber-infrastructure. 1 What are Working Papers? 1.1 Definition Working papers are unpublished versions of journal articles, book chapters, book reviews or other research-related manuscripts which are collected and disseminated in a systematic way. They vary in terms of completion from work in progress, which has not been submitted to a journal or publisher, to a manuscript that has been accepted for publication but is not yet revised for its final submission. Authors normally contribute to such series in the hope of getting valuable feedback on current research, which they intend to publish formally. However, those coordinating working-paper series can never guarantee contributions will be published and a minority of them are never peer-reviewed nor make it into print research sector papers circulating in this manner have been variously called grey literature, preprints, research manuscripts or memoranda, technical reports and working papers (Kling, 2004, 596-8). The last is the term of choice among social scientists. Working papers were invented by scientists several decades before the advent of the internet (Kling, 2004, 596-7). Although they were first circulated by electronics experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1946, this form of communication …