Open Bernard Mandeville Scholarship on Zenodo

 

We, the people studying history of philosophy, have not always been the best to take full advantage of the many brilliant ways out there to improve our scholarship and its visibility.

For example, even when many of us hang around Academia.edu (sometimes, perhaps, just to to see if one or two people have googled us this week), yet we are often quite poor at sharing our work, even when there is no reason not to share it. Parallel publishing (different from publishing in an open access journal) should be a norm and not an exception.

Parallel archiving/publishing means that a person first publishes her article in a regular journal. After that, she archives the article as such (if the publisher allows it) or an earlier version of it in an open digital repository. The published article, or a version of it, becomes publicly available through the parallel publication while the scholarly references are still made to the publication in the scientific journal. The idea of parallel publication is that in an open repository it is accessible to everyone for free. Archiving your pre-print drafts also helps the publisher in different ways. This is something that the publishers these days understand, even if scholars have not yet caught up with the trend.

Here is a recent example of a parallel publication in the mentioned Academia.edu by Robin Douglass:

https://www.academia.edu/12238390/Thomas_Hobbess_changing_account_of_liberty_and_challenge_to_republicanism

Note how Robin points out in this parallel publication that “This is a post-print version of the article and is not for citation. The published version is available at…”

This is a good point to be made regarding parallel publications for the sake of clarification. Also, one needs to check publisher policies regarding parallel publishing, these can be easily checked, for example, here:

http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/index.php

Some people in the history of philosophy have of course always been tech-savvy and versed in the principles of open access and open science. Yet, I believe it is the time that all of us start making our research as publicly available as possible. This will not only benefit us as individual scholars, but also the field of scholarship that we represent.

Mandeville Scholarship

A very good example of a line of scholarship that should be taking full advantage of open access and open science is research on Bernard Mandeville that is close to my heart. Mandeville scholarship is a small, but growing field (compared for example to the David Hume Business). What I have been thinking for some time now is that Mandevilleans would benefit immensely of finding new relevant research on Mandeville from one open repository.

Luckily that open repository is at hand and it is called Zenodo.  The great benefits of Zenodo is its easy-to-use interface, the possibility of saving multiple different kinds of works (not only articles), its direct link to Github (that might concern history of philosophy less at this point in time) and the chance of creating communities.

While writing this I created a community on Zenodo called “Bernard Mandeville Scholarship”.

http://zenodo.org/collection/user-mandeville

What you need to do now is to go to Zenodo, sign-up and start uploading parallel publications of your work, also unpublished drafts are good, as well as lectures etc. Every upload will also be marked with a DOI. If you use the following link, it will ensure that the uploaded record is added to Bernard Mandeville Scholarship community collection:

http://zenodo.org/deposit/?c=mandeville

Now, every time in the future you upload work related to Mandeville (old or new) in any possible form to Zenodo, just by noting that it is part of “Bernard Mandeville Scholarship” (or using the indicated link above), it can then be found by everyone together with other work on Mandeville by other people (given that they use the same community identifier when uploading it). Once the community starts growing (currently it is empty), we will also benefit of other websites harvesting Zenodo etc.

Thus, to repeat a little: if you are a Mandeville scholar or if you have done any work on Bernard Mandeville, sign up to Zenodo if you haven’t already. Upload your work on Zenodo and tag it as Bernard Mandeville Scholarship in the relevant field. Then tell a friend and ask them to start doing the same thing. This is what I will start doing as well – although I have most of my Mandeville publications archived as parallel publications elsewhere, the only thing that I have uploaded to Zenodo so far is one fleeting lecture. But this is to say that it is not too late for you either. And to underline the good part of Zenodo: it is not only for archiving publications, also other forms of relevant scholarship, even slides from your Mandeville presentations, are just as important.

If people deposit also their earlier work (all those gems from the 1970s onwards), soon we will have created with minimal effort a very useful repository for Mandeville scholarship. It couldn’t be any easier. At the same time, we move quickly beyond just listing and linking things related to Mandeville (although one very good form of documentation to have on Bernard Mandeville Scholarship on Zenodo is different lists as well, Irwin Primer has been very prolific in this lately). Hopefully, sooner than later we will have a significant body of work to be found from one repository shared openly and freely with everyone with internet access anywhere in the world. To me it seems that necessary steps for having more impact as a group and a community of Mandevilleans could not have been made any easier.

PS This blog post was written as part of my paper for Mandeville in Riga symposium, 8.-10.10.2015. In my paper I will suggest a collaborative authorship project for writing about contemporary relevance of Mandeville. More updates on that to follow later, if it takes off.

3 thoughts on “Open Bernard Mandeville Scholarship on Zenodo”

  1. For Dr. Mikko Tolonen
    Dear Mikko,
    It is gratifying to see how Mandeville’s Works and later scholarship on Mandeville are being spread on the Internet by the dedicated work of you and others who are expanding our knowledge of this important author. So I’ll toss off some ideas for you relating to this subject. Shouldn’t we have a Mandeville Society–just as we have societies on Defoe, Hume, Samuel Johnson, Jane Austen and others? And shouldn’t one of the obvious tasks of such a society be to record every past and new
    item, published and unpublished, that focuses on any aspect of the life and publications of Bernard Mandeville? My second suggestion can be boiled down to: maintaining a bibliography of works by and about Mandeville. It’s simple name is: The Bernard Mandeville Bibliography. A third feature that should
    be available free on the Internet is a MANDEVILLE QUARTERLY. Much that appears in such a digital journal would involve not only Mandeville himself but also his interrelationships with other thinkers. One obvious example is the Adam Smith-Bernard Mandeville connection, a subject that seems to be perennially interesting.

    There are more things in Mandeville to unearth and discuss, and I’m glad to see that you have contributed so strongly to this
    renewal of interest in all things Mandevillean.

    Best wishes in this effort.

    Irwin

    1. Dear Irwin,

      Many thanks for these thoughts. Believe it or not, I’ve been thinking about all of these aspects of Mandeville Society/Community/Fellowship, whatever the name. Now, I believe that the benefits of a formal Mandeville Society at this point in time are not so obvious. Hence, I thought that starting out by informal community might be a better way to build something more tangible.

      About the tasks that you mention, I think that curating Mandeville Bibliography is important, but even more important is that the available work becomes accessible to people – also those who have only a fleeting interest in Mandeville. Thus, the idea of repository where different work on Mandeville is offered as self-archived parallel publications + all the other research data relating to Mandeville (video clips, lectures, conference presentations, conference posters, listings of different aspects of bibliography etc.) might be more beneficial at this point in time. At the same time, automated ways of harvesting work related to Mandeville from different sites is one thing that I have in mind.

      The barrier of counting something as Mandeville scholarship should be as low as possible. At the same time, curating the Mandeville Zenodo repository is not a qualitative assessment in any sense, but the function of it is only to see that things related to John Mandeville, for example, are not included in the Bernard Mandeville community. Regarding the Mandeville Quarterly, I have been thinking about open access journal on Mandeville as well. Although, I think that it might appear perhaps once a year (sort of like Adam Smith Review, although with open access). This could easily be developed also on Zenodo site. I’m thinking that Mandeville Studies journal should experiment with open peer review etc.

      But first I think it would be very important that we would get as much already existing Mandeville scholarship available to people. As one example, I was recommending your paper on Mandeville on war to a colleague. The reason that he had not found it was that it did not turn up on google. And when it did, the only thing related to it was my reference in another article to that piece. Hence, if you should for example choose to self-archive your voluminous and crucial papers on Mandeville on the Zenodo site, this would become accessible to a vast range of younger scholars and my work would be partly done.

      Thanks again, the aim is to keep the spirit of Mandeville scholarship going that you have been advancing for more than forty years now.

      All best,

      Mikko

  2. The response to the floating of the second Mandeville web site within the last ten years or so is disheartening, but the idea should nevertheless be kept alive. At the very least, this site
    should serve as a central repository for any bibliographical
    references in which Mandeville has a significant role. I hope
    that this reply will help to keep that purpose alive.

    Irwin

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