Robbins Library Notes

Back in October, I wrote a post about the Humanities Research Network (HRN). This morning, I received a forwarded e-mail describing the Philosophy Research Network (PRN), a subset of the HRN. Here’s the e-mail:

Dear Colleagues,

You might be interested to know about a new venture that we have a hand in, the Philosophy Research Network (PRN). We hope you will find it as promising for pursuing philosophical work as we do.

PRN represents an expansion of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). SSRN is a massive website started 10 years ago or so by scholars in law, economics, business and so forth. It is a place for scholars to post working papers (free of charge) so that those dealing with related topics can locate and download them (also free of charge). It thus consolidates and organizes the sort of electronic exchanges that already occur via e-mail or through private websites. Users can find related work through title, keyword, abstract, and author searches; they can also receive email announcements of new postings in their areas of interest.

SSRN currently hosts around 160,000 papers; downloads are currently running at around 4 million papers per year. In short, this service is a big success in the social sciences. PRN promises to be an equally useful resource.

We invite you to post your work in progress on PRN. You’ll need a pdf version of the papers you want to post, and an abstract of each that you can cut and paste into a text box during the posting process. (SSRN provides a link to a site that lets you create pdfs without cost.) Most of the papers now on PRN are cross-listed from pre-existing networks within SSRN – law, economics, etc. This will change as philosophers add their own papers.

To see an example, click on the link below for David Velleman’s author page.

 
The email service announcing new postings in each subject area – called ‘journals’ – will be launched soon. Free trial subscriptions will be available, and we hope you will encourage your university to obtain a site license.

PHILOSOPHY RESEARCH NETWORK

To view all subject areas, click on this link: http://www.ssrn.com/update/prn-/prn_jrl.html

To view all the papers in the Philosophy Research Network:  
To find general information about the network and posting: http://ssrn.com/update/general/ssrn_faq.html

Signing on the first time takes a few minutes, but after that it’s very easy. Your papers can be found on your own personal page (created automatically when you post a paper), by searching the SSRN site, and by perusing the subject matter areas in which you list them.

The network does very light screening to exclude non-scholarly material and to refine the classification of papers. Otherwise there is no peer review, and this posting does not amount to a publication. It is solely for facilitating communication among philosophers. Posting on PRN is similar to circulating work in progress at conferences, among friends, or through a personal web page.

SSRN is mostly a site for working papers, but you can post published papers there as well, as long as you have not given away electronic rights.

One caveat: Authors in other fields will sometimes classify their papers for PRN, not always appropriately. We are working on that problem, but please expect some amount of imperfection in this process.

We look forward to seeing your posts on PRN.

Lawrence C. Becker
Fellow, Hollins University

Brie Gertler
Department of Philosophy
University of Virginia

PRN Advisory Board

Julia Annas, Regents Professor of Philosophy, University of Arizona

David Chalmers, Professor of Philosophy, ARC Federation Fellow, and Director of the Center for Consciousness, Australian National University

Maudemarie Clark, Carleton Professor of Philosophy, Colgate University

Christine Korsgaard, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University

A. John Simmons, Commonwealth Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law, University of Virginia

Elliott Sober, Hans Reichenbach Professor of Philosophy and William F. Vilas Research Professor, University of Wisconsin

Ernest Sosa, Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers University

Brian Weatherson, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Cornell University