Brie Gertler (Virginia) asked me to share this, and while I usually don't do these kinds of announcements, this one really is a public service to the profession, about which philosophers should know. I've inserted a couple of comments in brackets:
There is now a cost-free, centralized place to post work in progress, called the Philosophy Research Network. The Philosophy Research Network (PRN) is part of the Social Science Research Network, a massive website started 10 years ago or so by scholars in law, economics, business and so forth. There are hundreds of thousands of papers and abstracts now posted on the SSRN, and in the last 12 months there have been over 3,700,000 downloads of papers through the site. In short, this service is a big success in the social sciences. It is a one-stop place for people to post working papers so that those dealing with related topics can have access to them (free of charge). It thus consolidates and organizes the sort of electronic exchanges that already occur via e-mail, or through private websites. And it improves on such exchanges by allowing users to access new work through keyword, abstract, or author searches.
The PRN will be formally launched later this summer, and you will see an announcement about it from the APA. But we are happy to say that the network is now accessible in a preliminary way, and we invite you to try it out by posting some of your work. You’ll need a PDF version of the papers you want to post, and an abstract of each that you can cut and paste into a text box during the posting process. (For those without the ability to create pdfs, the process will direct you to a site that allows you to transform your document into a pdf without cost.) [BL: note that the PDF file must have a document name that has no spaces in it, otherwise the system will not accept it!]
The PRN will eventually have its own web address, but you can get to it now by going here. You will see a full list of the sub-networks. If you expand the Humanities Research Network list (by clicking on the + sign to the left), you will see the one for philosophy. And if you expand that, and then expand the list of “subject matter journals” in philosophy, you will see what we’re up to. We recently put up papers of our own just to test-drive the system. Signing on and getting this done the first time is a little bit of a hassle, but after that it’s very easy. And your papers can be found on your own personal page (created automatically when you sign up) and by perusing the subject matter areas in which you want them listed.
SSRN is based at the University of Texas, but supports its staff and infrastructure through university sponsorships and institutional subscriptions. The network does very light screening to exclude material of a non-scholarly sort, and to refine the classification of papers – for example by increasing the number of cross listings. [BL: a big problem in academic law is that papers get listed in far too many subject categories, where they don't really belong--I expect this will be less of a problem in philosophy.] Otherwise there is no peer review, and this posting does not amount to a publication. It is solely for facilitating communication among philosophers who are working on similar things – and thus it is in the same line of work as conferences, and circulating papers among friends.
The PRN Advisory Board is: Julia Annas, David Chalmers, Maudemarie Clark, Christine Korsgaard, A. John Simmons, Elliott Sober, Ernest Sosa, and Brian Weatherson.
A final note: most of the papers that are now on PRN were originally posted on other parts of the SSRN site, and cross-listed by the SSRN staff. [BL: the SSRN staff, not surprisingly, missed quite a lot of philosophical papers that are already on SSRN; and many of those they have included don't really belong there. I hope the real philosophy editors will correct this!] For this reason, they tend to be on topics that are only marginally philosophical. Once the network is fully launched, such pieces will be a small minority of the available papers.
Please don't hesitate to write to either of us with any questions about using the PRN.Lawrence C. BeckerFellow, Hollins UniversityProfessor of Philosophy Emeritus, College of William & MaryBrie GertlerDepartment of PhilosophyUniversity of Virginia
Longtime readers of this blog will be familiar with SSRN, since I've posted many of my papers there the last couple of years--indeed, I listed my most recent jurisprudential paper on the new PRN network, as well as SSRN. Quite some time ago now, I had offered my colleague Bernie Black, who is one of the co-owners of SSRN, advice about how to set up the philosophy section (though, being stretched thin, I declined to take on a more formal role). I am delighted to see so many excellent philosophers on board for the enterprise. SSRN has been a huge success in academic law (not in all fields, but in some of them), and I hope it will be similarly successful for philosophers.
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