The Cultural Studies E-Print Archive Project
Gary Hall

Abstract:

The aim of the Cultural Studies E-Print Archive Project is to establish for cultural studies an equivalent to the arXiv.org E-Print Archive. Founded in 1991 by Paul Ginsparg and originally based at the Los Alamos National Physics Laboratory in the US before moving to Cornell University in December 2001, the arXiv.org E-Print Archive holds over 130,000 papers, has deposits of a further 25,000 new papers every year, and is accessed by approximately 35,000 people daily. It works as follows. Whenever a physics scholar is about to publish a text, they send a pre-print copy to this archive. This pre-print is then made available to any researcher, scholar or student who wants it, free of charge. They simply have to download the file from the archive. This presentation will introduce the Cultural Studies E-Print Archive Project and highlight its potential consequences for research publication in the cultural studies field. Not least among these is the possibility of making all the cultural studies research literature (both past and present) freely available to researchers, teachers and students, on a world wide basis, regardless of how much particular publishers decide to charge for their books and journals, and of how much individual institutions and libraries can afford to pay for them.