The Open Access (OA) movement is most typically associated with a specific disciplinary domain and a specific format of research literature: The scientific journal article. But OA is actually much broader than this. For instance, there are movements toward OA in disciplines as diverse as History, Anthropology, Economics, and Classics, and movements toward the creation of OA monographs, OA courseware, OA textbooks, and OA data. OA is unconstrained by discipline or format. To illustrate, here are some highly-respected OA resources in the discipline of Philosophy:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Like its print predecessors, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Paul Edwards, editor. 1967) and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Edward Craig, editor. 1998 – in print and online), the editorial board and contributors to the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a contemporary Who’s Who in the discipline. Here you will find Paul Guyer as subject editor for articles on Kant; David Chalmers for the Philosophy of Mind; Alvin Goldman for Epistemology; Ted Cohen for Aesthetics; John Cooper for Ancient Philosophy; Stephen Darwall for the History of Ethics; Jason Stanley for Philosophy of Language; Michael Della Rocca for 17th Century Philosophy; Hopkins’ own Hilary Bok for Bioethics; et. al. And the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy includes non-Western, comparative philosophy as well: Chad Hansen editing articles on Chinese Philosophy; Jay Garfield on Indian Philosophy. In short, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides all the editorial rigor of its predecessors, with the added benefit of being continually updated and Open Access.

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
The print monograph remains the coin of the realm for most humanities disciplines, and philosophy is no exception. But how can one keep up with what’s being published? The Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews fills this niche, providing reviews of current (six to twelve months after publication) reviews of books in the field — and it provides a lot of reviews: “three to ten in the course of each week”. Again, like the board of the Stanford Encyclopedia, the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews board reads like a Who’s Who in contemporary (North American) philosophy.

Philosopher’s Imprint
Philosopher’s Imprint is an interesting project. Edited by Yale’s Stephen Darwall and NYU’s J. David Velleman, it is essentially an online, peer-reviewed journal. Unlike most journals, though, it publishes papers irregularly, i.e., it publishes papers when they are ready to be published. Such is the benefit of e-only publication. As with the Stanford Encyclopedia and the Notre Dame Reviews, its editorial board consists of some of North America’s most prominent philosophers — all of which is to emphasize, Open Access publications can be every bit as rigorous in their review procedures and every bit as high quality as their print counterparts.

And yes, Philosophy has its own disciplinary repository of papers, similar to what the physicists have in arXiv — it’s called PhilPapers.

For Open Access Week 2011 (October 24-30) the Scholarly Communications Group is sponsoring a quiz about Open Access. A quiz with PRIZES! Read our blog posts, answer the questions correctly, and you will be eligible for prizes. Prizes are 3 $20 Barnes and Noble gift cards and a $60 gift card to The Dizz. The quiz will be available until Oct. 31.


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