I really want to post a pre-print of my recently published article in the Journal of Responsible Innovation: “Designing Responsible Research and Innovation as a tool to encourage serendipity could enhance the broader societal impacts of research.” Here’s a link to the published version. One thing about this article that would be obvious if one were to compare the pre-print to the final published version is just how much the latter was improved by peer review and input from the journal editor.

Since I still don’t have an institutional repository at NJIT, I could post it at Humanities Commons. Before I do that, I want to make sure I don’t get sideways with Taylor and Francis. So, the prudent thing to do is to check with SHERPA/RoMEO to see what the journal policies are. The problem, however, is that SHERPA/RoMEO hasn’t yet ‘graded’ JRI, so they don’t tell me what the policies are. This is all sort of understandable, since JRI is still a relatively new journal. Searching an older journal put out by the same publisher, Social Epistemology, tells me that I could post both pre-prints and post-prints — that is, my version, but not the actual publisher’s PDF, of the article after it went through peer review — of articles I published there. So, maybe I could go ahead, assuming that Taylor and Francis policy is consistent across all their journals. Instead, I requested that SHERPA/RoMEO grade JRI.

I can wait a while to post the pre-print, and I want to gauge how long it takes to get a grade. I’m also waiting to find out how long it takes for JRI to show up in Scopus (their main ‘about‘ page says they are indexed in Scopus, but it hasn’t shown up in Scopus, yet).  I’ve also been told that NJIT is getting bepress soon.

All of these — Humanities Commons, SHERPA/RoMEO, bepress — are tools for serendipity in the sense in which I outline the term in this article. As soon as I can let everyone see it, I will!