Designing Research Infrastructure for Open-access Publishing

Abstract

innovative for designers, scholars, and publishers. THE RISE OF OPEN-ACCESS SCHOLARSHIP The medium of academic publishing has changed radically in the last 20 years, since the advent of the Web in the early 1990s, although that change has come more slowly to the humanities and social sciences, including design studies, than in the hard sciences. The creation of disciplinary-specific repositories in the early 1990s flourished in the sciences with examples such as arXiv.org now containing over 1 million pre-prints. Pre-prints ​ are articles written for submission to peer-reviewed journals but which have not yet undergone the peerreview process. A ​post-print ​ is the manuscript ​after ​ it has been peer-reviewed but before it has been copyedited. The concept of pre-prints and post-prints have been widely accepted and used in the sciences for almost three decades and are de facto ​open access ​ , meaning that this scholarship even as it is only in draft form is freely available on the Web for anyone with an Internet connection.