Volunteer for Philosophy Papers Blog

Brian Weatherson is looking to pass on the administration of the Online Philosophy Papers blog.

“Now that everyone in philosophy has papers online, keeping track of all the address changes, clawing through all the false positives (people who keep things like office hours, or lists of talks in their departments etc on their papers page have pages that update all the time without much interest), finding out whether something is a paper or basically a blog post to a non-blog, separating out the philosophy papers from the non-philosophy papers on sites that have both, etc takes more time than I can really spare. And I have another project that I’ll be launching soon that will take up a fair bit of time. So I suspect that I’ll basically give it all up fairly soon.”

I don’t blame him. Keeping track of research online is more of a chore than it should be. When you put a paper up on your homepage, you should also upload it to one of the central depositories, so that everyone knows there’s new work to check out. This is what happens in other disciplines that use the arXiv.org e-Print archive. And that’s what we should be doing as well.

I am one of those who hasn’t been doing that consistently, so I will try to reform myself. I suspect that putting a leaky draft on your own homepage feels like it’s less of a public exposure than uploading it to the semanticsarchive or the like. But that’s certainly illusory.

So, here’s what we should all do:

  • By all means, put anything new you have written on your own homepage (or your department’s papers page).
  • But also upload it to a central depository:
  • Subscribe to the RSS feeds for the depositories (the Semantics Archive and Philosophy Papers Online have one, and LingBuzz probably will soon) to keep tabs on what’s new.
  • Comment on new work on your blog (or your department’s blog) with links back to the depository copy (via automatic trackback at some future time, I’m sure).

Ah yes. In the mean time, until we’re all civilized citizens of the online research world, there will still be a need for the service Brian has been providing. I hope he finds someone to take over the job.

Post a Comment | Trackbacks Closed