MIT Libraries support open scholarship in the social sciences through SocArXiv

Platform created by sociologists, librarians, and open access advocates

The MIT Libraries are pleased to announce our support of SocArXiv, an open archive of the social sciences that launched in beta version in November 2016. This free, noncommercial service for rapid sharing of academic papers is built on the Open Science Framework, a platform for researchers to upload data and code as well as research results.

“SocArXiv’s vision of social science without walls is perfectly aligned with our efforts to support open access publishing,” says Greg Eow, associate director for collections at the MIT Libraries. “Partnerships like this will be critical to making progress toward our goal of providing unprecedented worldwide access to research.”

MIT joins the University of California, Los Angeles, as a SocArXiv partner. The Open Society Foundations and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation have also provided significant early funding for the initiative. SocArXiv is led by a steering committee of sociologists and research library leaders, including MIT Libraries Director Chris Bourg.

“We’re delighted that the leaders of these forward-thinking organizations are stepping forward to support open scholarship in the social sciences,” says Philip Cohen, SocArXiv director and a sociologist at the University of Maryland.

Since development was first announced in July 2016, researchers have deposited more than 800 papers, which have been downloaded more than 10,000 times. Bourg’s dissertation, Gender Mistakes and Inequality, is currently one of the most downloaded papers in the archive.

SocArXiv is a partner of the nonprofit Center for Open Science (COS) and is housed at the University of Maryland. For more information, visit socopen.org.