These days many academics, including I would guess most who read this blog, keep collections of their papers available on their websites. (If you’re interested in seeing some samples, Dave Chalmers keeps a fairly comprehensive list of people with online papers in philosophy.) In the last few years several issues about the relationship between posting something to a webpage and publishing it in a book or journal have become a little pressing.

There’s actually a tangle of inter-related questions here that could use sorting out. For one thing, there are both legal questions (about copyright) and moral questions (about whether such posting is stealing from editors who’ve agreed to publish things) about the practice. For another, the answers to those questions may be different for articles that have been published, or have been accepted but not published, or are as yet homeless. For another, it might make a difference whether the journal in question is electronic or dead tree. So there’s potentially ten or twelve different questions here.

I hadn’t thought much about the moral issues until my colleague Dave Estlund raised them. I think they are interesting, but my first inclination is to think there probably isn’t a major moral problem here. I suspect there are other duties I have that override any duties I may have to journals. For instance, I suspect there is a general duty on academics to promote the growth of knowledge, and in this case it overrides duties to provide journals with virgin pages, for instance. (I also think Brown pays me to promote the growth of knowledge rather than to provide copy for journals, and that’s already a duty that might justify posting papers to websites, I think.)

Having said that, there’s a few restrictions I keep to when posting papers that might indicate I really do (at some level) take the moral questions more seriously.

First, I never post PDFs of an article as it will look in print to a freely accessible website. I know some people do this, and I think it’s probably defensible, but I think there’s a plausible argument that the journal has a right (i.e. a moral right) to have a say over where those PDFs go. After all, it was their layout work that made it look like that. (In philosophy at least there’s still layout work done by journals – we don’t send LaTeX files in ready to print.)

Second, I don’t normally post articles that are intended for (exclusively) online journals. Again, this isn’t a hard and fast rule, but I feel a little bad about doing something functionally equivalent to what that journal will do eventually.

I’ve noticed a few people keep to a third restriction, which I usually do in practice if not by intent. That practice is to only post penultimate drafts to their personal webpage, not the final copy. Now I’m normally too lazy to make the corrections I make on the page proofs (adding ‘not’ in the right places etc.) on my online copies, so I suppose most of my online papers are penultimate at best. But this isn’t a deliberate policy.

I can’t tell if keeping to these rules is an indication that I really do care about theiving from journals and so posting anything is really wrong, or I think there are trade-offs to be made here and so I’m following a reasonable, even sophisticated, policy.

The legal issues raise different complications. Most journals seem to have conceded that they can’t block everything that has appeared online, so they have de facto conceded that articles can appear on web pages before they appear in print. This concession isn’t universal. The New England Journal of Medicine won’t (or at least wouldn’t last I checked) publish papers that have previously appeared online. But it seems most of them have practically conceded defeat here.

What happens with articles that have been accepted, or even appeared in print, might be different. Several people keep available papers that have appeared in print, as the briefest scan through Chalmers’s list will reveal. (Indeed, many people only post printed articles.) But it’s not clear to me that journals couldn’t fight back a little here. If I were running a journal I would consider asking writers to remove personal copies of papers from their websites once they had appeared in print, and if I did ask that it wouldn’t be a throwaway line – I would make some efforts to enforce it. I certainly think journals (and book publishers) would be within their moral rights to do this, and it’s hard to see how they would be out of their legal rights.

I’d be very interested to know what the experience has been in other disciplines. Philosophy has been quite different to some other fields in that we have never had a central archive for papers, nor even a really active mailing list culture for distributing preprint papers. People send papers to their friends, but they don’t announce on mailing lists that papers are available. (Nowadays I make an effort to make those announcements, but I’m running a pretty small scale project.) So we don’t really have the experience that other disciplines have.

Appendix
Here’s the policies that two prominent online paper archives I follow have about the connection between posting to the archive and publication.

Semantics Archive
This third point is the tricky one. Strict legal rules do not currently quite match commonly accepted practice in Linguistics and other fields, and there are some difficult cases where conflicting interests must be balanced. On the one hand, if a journal owns the copyright, they have the legal right to decide where and how the paper is made available to the public. On the other hand, if it takes two years or more for a paper to go through the refereeing and publication process, you, the journal, and the field will all benefit from making a pre-print version available sooner: wider exposure generates feedback, which improves the quality of the revised paper and generates interest in the published version. Will anyone cancel their subscription to L&P because of the archive? We strongly doubt it.

We’re not lawyers, of course, but our rule of thumb is: if it’s appropriate to post a paper on your publicly-accessible professional web site, it’s appropriate to post it on the archive. Think of the archive as a meta-web site that gathers in one place some portion of individual semanticists’ web pages. Also, bear in mind that you can always delete an item when it finally becomes available in print.

Rutgers Optimality Archive
Publication status. Archiving is not a form of publication. By accepted academic convention, well-established in the hard sciences, electronic archiving is completely independent of publication, future or prior. It is the equivalent of mailing out a typescript, pre-print, or off-print to colleagues.

Electronic archiving shares and generalizes the advantages of private circulation of papers. Authors are put in a position to receive maximal feedback from the entire community of interested researchers. Ideas and results are disseminated rapidly and widely, unchanneled by sociological limitations. Journals, volumes, and other venues of publication receive a boost in quality from the vastly broader pre-publication review of work, and benefit commercially from the visibility accorded to the material they publish. Authors should, of course, take care in the matter of signing over their intrinsic copyright.

It’s also notable I guess that the very biggest preprint archives, SSRN in social sciences and arXiv.org in physical sciences, seem to have no policy whatsoever on this. On the other hand, eprints.org has quite detailed information on just this point. Their position seems to be that bans on pre-publication do not rule out electronic posting (self-archiving as they call it) but some journals could explicitly rule this out if they wanted to.