Hprints, the Nordic arts and humanities e-print archive, has now officially launched. (Thanks to H-Net and Klaus Graf.) From the site:
Hprints is an Open Access repository aiming at making scholarly documents from the Arts and Humanities publicly available to the widest possible audience. It is the first of its kind in the Nordic Countries for the Humanities.
Hprints is a direct tool for scientific communication between academics. In the database scholars can upload full-text research material such as articles, papers, conference papers, book chapters etc....
For scholars this is an opportunity to gain longstanding visibility. First of all, it is possible to search and find the paper by defined topics through an Internet search. Secondly, all submitted papers will be stored permanently and receive a stable web address.
...The archive is now open for submission and browsing (as of spring 2008)....
The submission policy is that content of the posted material should be comparable to that of a paper that could in principle be accepted for publication in a scientific journal....
Hprints.org is initially a Nordic project (funded by the Nordbib funding agency), but it is open to all humanities scholars world-wide....Readers get free access to the latest scholarly research within their field, through RSS and email alerts.
Comment. Note that the hprints submission policy mentions discipline (any field within the humanities) and readiness ("could in principle be accepted for publication in a scientific journal"), but not institutional affiliation or nationality. That makes it a universal repository for the humanities ("open to all humanities scholars world-wide"), which is new and significant. For background, see my past posts on hprints.
Update (4/20/08). Klaus Graf has learned that hprints will accept articles in any language, confirming its universality. (Thanks, Klaus.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/18/2008 09:53:00 AM.
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.
