ROA Policies

Goals. The Rutgers Optimality Archive (ROA) exists to facilitate the exchange of research results, following the precedent of the vast scientific archives at xxx.lanl.gov. Papers in the Archive are unedited, unreviewed, unhouseled, unaneled, self-selected, unsolicited, and without imprimatur. The Archive is open to any and all who want to make their work in or on Optimality Theory available to the research community. Downloading is free of charge or obligation and is completely anonymous.

Publication status. Archiving is not a form of publication. By accepted academic convention, well-established in the hard sciences, electronic archiving is completely independent of publication, future or prior. It is the equivalent of mailing out a typescript, pre-print, or off-print to colleagues.

Electronic archiving shares and generalizes the advantages of private circulation of papers. Authors are put in a position to receive maximal feedback from the entire community of interested researchers. Ideas and results are disseminated rapidly and widely, unchanneled by sociological limitations. Journals, volumes, and other venues of publication receive a boost in quality from the vastly broader pre-publication review of work, and benefit commercially from the visibility accorded to the material they publish. Authors should, of course, take care in the matter of signing over their intrinsic copyright.

Citation. Following current practice, bibliographic citation of papers obtained from ROA should at least mention the Optimality Archive, the ROA-number, and the URL http://roa.rutgers.edu/. E.g.—

Green, Thomas and Michael Kenstowicz. 1995. The Lapse Constraint.

ROA-101, Rutgers Optimality Archive, http://roa.rutgers.edu/

Revision and Removal. Papers may be updated at any time under their original ROA number. Authors may also post revised versions of their papers under a new ROA number. Upon receipt of a new version and authorial instruction, the older file will typically be removed from the archive, with an annotation to that effect placed in the superannuated entry, along with a pointer to the new ROA-number. At the author's request, a paper may be entirely removed from the archive; in this case, only title and author information will remain.

Refusal. The Rutgers Optimality Archive has the right to refuse posting to, or to remove from the archive, any paper which is deemed not relevant to the above-stated goals, or which is deemed to violate normal academic standards of discourse.