Archive Policy

Submissions

PhilSci-Archive is offered by its sponsors as a free service to philosophers of science. Its goal is to preserve and foster the rapid exchange of new work in philosophy of science. We aim to provide a stable, openly accessible repository in which scholarly articles and monographs may find a permanent home. Works posted here can be linked to from across the web and freely viewed without the need for a user account. While tailored specifically to philosophers of science, PhilSci-Archive follows the same principles of openness and critical exchange that underlie pre-print archives in physics (arXiv) and biology (biorXiv).

Preprints and postprints posted on the archive are restricted to those in philosophy of science or related material of interest to professional philosophers of science. The range of admissible topics and the style of analysis is set by the topics and styles of material publishable in the Philosophy of Science Association journal, Philosophy of Science.

The archive posts complete, self-contained papers and manuscript monographs that have achieved a stable form. It strongly discourages repeated postings to correct errors in works posted in haste. The archive does not post short notes, letters and other material that do not fit the model of a scholarly paper or monograph. The archive does not support threaded discussions. The archive will only post postprints published under a Creative Commons license. In addition to the primary document, users may upload relevant supplementary material such as appendices and submit them together in a single archive item. We do not recommend uploading data as supplementary material to PhilSci-Archive, but users may wish to deposit relevant data in Zenodo or some other data repository and include a link in the archive item metadata.

The archive also posts separate "publication" records, whose use is restricted to informing archive users of the published article or volume derived from a preprint already posted on the archive. These records include a link to the publication deriving from a preprint on the archive and do not require the uploading of a document.

Since the content of the archive is moderated, we regret that we can only accept works written in English. This applies to general submissions only. Our Open Access "Echoes" contain non-English articles with that have been peer reviewed so don't require moderation. Conference organizers may formulate their own language policies for conference sections. In these exceptional cases we require the inclusion of an English title and abstract. (Rule revised May 15, 2009, December 2018)

Up to two business days for a paper and up to one to two weeks for a monograph should be allowed between the time a submission is deposited to the archive and the time it becomes accessible to other users of the archive.

Rejections

The archive reserves the right to refuse to post submissions it deems to lie outside these boundaries. Because of the volume of material posted, the archive cannot enter into correspondence concerning submissions that have been refused.

The archive reserves the right to remove posted items that have been subsequently determined to be clearly outside the range of suitable material, as specified above. Authors will be notified promptly in the rare cases in which such removals occur.

Disclaimer

No representation is made by the archive on the accuracy or quality of preprints or postprints posted. The views and opinions expressed are those of the authors and not the archive sponsors. With respect to the documents available from this server, the archive sponsors make no warranty, expressed or implied, including warrants of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement, and the sponsors do not assume any liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information or material.

All documents available from this server may be protected under U.S. and foreign copyright laws, and may not be reproduced without permission.

The archive takes the act of posting a work as a representation by the person posting that the work does not contain libelous or defamatory material, that the person posting the work owns the copyright to it and grants users of the archive permission to make a copy of the work for their private use.

Removals

PhilSci-Archive will honor all requests from authors for the removal of files they deposited along with their associated bibliographic metadata. See the (FAQ dealing with removal.) However, note that most journals do not require the removal of a preprint upon publication. Authors can check a journal's copyright policy by visiting Sherpa/Romeo.

Name Change Requests

PhilSci-Archive honors requests from Archive users for name and/or pronoun changes in items they are associated with on the Archive. These changes are available on request and require no legal documentation. We are committed to making the process simple and to implementing requests swiftly. The user requesting the changes should simply submit this contact form, which will notify the current Archive Manager and Editor-in-Chief that a request has been initiated. The user will then receive an email from the Archive Manager requesting edited versions of any Archive items that need to be updated with the name change. The Archive Manager will then make the requested changes within about two days and email the user to confirm once the changes have been completed. The Archive Manager will keep a record of changes made in response to name change requests for the purpose of tracking the associated workload. This record will not be public, and only de-identified information from it (e.g. number of total changes annually) will be shared with other members of the Archive Board. PhilSci-Archive will not issue any sort of notice of the name change to other users, or otherwise publicize the updates. Users may request that a note documenting that a change of name occurred be included in the metadata of the relevant item, but this is entirely optional. We welcome feedback from any user about how to make our policies and procedures more inclusive.

Out of Print

PhilSci-Archive accepts a small number of out of print texts in philosophy of science, strictly limited to texts that, in the judgment of PhilSci Archive, are of central importance in philosophy of science and are still sought by present-day philosophers of science. Proposals for such texts should be made informally by email to philsci-archive@mail.pitt.edu.

Before any works proposed can be posted, they must be free of copyright encumbrance. That may be the case already if the text is sufficiently old to be in the public domain, as are works published under US copyright prior to 1923. However, copyright law is complicated and it may not always be clear if a text is in the public domain. See http:// www.copyright.gov/. For works for which a copyright is still in force, written permission to reproduce the work online must be obtained from the copyright holder. Since we expect to post a limited number of volumes only, we ask that proposers contact philsci-archive to discuss the proposed volume, before any approach to a copyright holder is made.