Academics and other people interested in peer-reviewed research are often frustrated about paywalls and publication delays, and confused about what’s allowed in terms of sharing drafts and published articles online. I was recently made aware of a great resource for dealing with the latter of those issues: The SHERPA/RoMEO database for publisher copyright policies and self-archiving rights. While published articles are often hidden behind paywalls, many journals allow authors to self-archive pre-prints (drafts prior to peer review) and/or post-prints (accepted drafts after peer-review, but prior to typesetting and final edits by the journal) on their own website, or in online repositories. Some even allow authors to distribute the final, typeset articles this way. What the RoMEO database does is to provide a search tool for finding the policies of individual journals. This can be very helpful for academics who are wondering which of their articles can be distributed in what form and fashion, and may perhaps be useful even for choosing where to submit a paper in the first place.
In my own case, I was pleased to find that the home of one of my long “in press” articles – which passed peer-review and was accepted for publication already a year and a half ago, but is still frustratingly clogged up in a publication queue – allows self-archiving of post-prints. So in order to make sure that this article does not become even more outdated than it already is by now, I have made “Dis/Unity of Knowledge: Models for the Study of Modern Esotericism and Science” available from the publication list here on Heterodoxology (and over at Occult Minds). The final article will hopefully appear in Numen some time later this year.
Heterodoxology 