Self-Archive E-Prints in Disciplinary Archives

A preprint is a draft version of an article. A postprint is a published version of an article. Digital preprints and postprints are collectively called e-prints. A disciplinary archive contains e-prints about one or more subjects written by scholars from all over the world.

More and more disciplinary archives are being created and used. For example, the arXiv, Cogprints, and the RePEc.

You can find relevant disciplinary archives using The Directory of Open Access Repositories.

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) has created a standard (OAI-PMH) for retrieving descriptive information about e-prints stored in archives so that it can be used in search systems, such as OAIster. Many disciplinary archives are OAI-PMH compliant.

You can self-archive your e-print in a disciplinary archive. If you're worried about the time it takes to deposit materials, rest assured. It should not take longer than 6-10 minutes, about the time you'd spend sending copies to various colleagues by email.