Opening up your research : a guide to self-archiving

Lupton, Deborah. Opening up your research : a guide to self-archiving. LSE. The Impact Blog, 20th September 2013. En ligne : http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/09/20/opening-up-your-research-self-archiving-for-sociologists/ [Consulté le 1er septembre 2014)

I have been reading more and more about the virtues of making one’s academic research available on open access sites (also known as ‘self-archiving’) and the best ways of doing this. There are several reasons why this is a good idea. Open access publishing makes your research visible by removing it from behind paywalls and rendering it accessible to anyone with an internet connection. An increasing number of research funding bodies are now expecting this as part of their requirements. It has been demonstrated that uploading your material to open access services increases academic citations of your work, and therefore contributes to its impact.

Sociologists in general are way behind academics in some other disciplines in their use of any kind of digital technologies as part of their research and scholarship. Those of us using social and other digital media, therefore, have fewer colleagues with whom to interact. A critical mass of ‘digitised sociologists’ has yet to be generated. In failing to use open access archiving, sociologists are missing out on sharing their work, gaining a greater audience and citation numbers, achieving engagement with those who do not have access to journal collections and accessing other sociologists’ research.

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Monique Abud

Centre d'études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine, EHESS, Paris, France

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