Early Modern E-Prints is a new directory of OA scholarship on the early modern era. It's not a repository, but it aims to link to OA editions of all the relevant texts it can find. From the site:
The traditional products of academic research - peer-reviewed journal articlels, chapters from books, works in progress, seminar and conference papers, theses and dissertations - are increasingly being made available online in open access journals and repositories and publishers' own websites. But at present humanities disciplines are lagging behind the sciences in the creation of subject-based repositories; works on historical subjects are scattered across the web and often difficult to locate. This page is intended to facilitate access to full-text academic publications and postgraduate theses on early modern topics.
From an accompanying blog post by Sharon Howard, the force behind the new directory:
Early Modern E-prints is now up and running. At the moment it’s very small, but I have plenty more entries to add over the coming months. You can help out if you know of examples of the following, on any early modern (ie, c.1500-1800) topic: [1] Research papers and publications archived at academics’ personal webpages, which can be particularly hard to track down. [2] Articles, chapters, papers and so on from sources (journals, books, e-seminars, etc) that aren’t specifically devoted to early modern history (this may include graduate student journals, as long as they’re peer-reviewed). [3] Free samples (book chapters, issues of journals) from publishers’ websites. [4] Postgraduate theses and dissertations....
I hope that eventually there will be full-scale open access repositories for history and this resource will no longer be needed. But in the meantime it should help to facilitate access to good quality academic research for people who are studying early modern history but don’t have access to well-stocked university libraries, and it may also encourage the development of open access publishing/archiving by historians.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/11/2006 12:14:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
