ROA Policies
Goals.
The Rutgers Optimality Archive (ROA) exists to
facilitate the exchange of research results in Optimality Theory and its conceptural affiliates, following the precedent of
the vast scientific archives at arXiv.org.
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 Optimality Theory and related
theories of grammar available to the research community. Downloading is free of charge or obligation
and is completely anonymous. Appropriate submissions to the Archive include
papers, monographs, dissertations, and may extend to handouts and slides if
these are detailed enough to allow full reconstruction of claims and
arguments. Following the policy of arXiv.org, submissions containing only an
abstract will not be accepted.
Publication status. Archiving is not a form of publication. In many areas of academia and research, electronic archiving is regarded as completely independent of publication, future or prior. It is the equivalent of mailing out a typescript, pre-print, or off-print to colleagues. We accept this view.
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.
Rights and Copyrights.
In posting to the Rutgers Optimality Archive (ROA), the author or authors affirm that ROA has the right to physically possess an electronic copy of their manuscript and the right to make it available for download over the internet, without charge or other limitations on access. ROA makes no claim to any other rights with respect to the items posted here. ROA itself currently has no arrangements with other download sites for the transfer of materials; in posting a work to ROA, authors are agreeing only to allow it on ROA.
Posting to ROA is understood to be an affirmation by the author or authors that they control the relevant rights to their work, either by virtue of retaining the copyright or through an agreement with whoever currently holds the copyright. By virtue of posting to ROA, the author or authors also affirm that they have dealt appropriately with copyright restrictions pertaining to all 3rd party materials included in their work. In light of these authorial affirmations, all responsibility for copyright issues remains with the authors who post here. Authors should, of course, take care in the matter of signing over their implicit
copyright to their own work.
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 by registered authors at any time under their original ROA number; they will be given a new version number. Authors may also wish to post thoroughly revised versions of their papers under a new ROA number, in which case they are free to indicate the relation to previous work in the comment field. At the author's request, a paper may be withdrawn from the archive; in this case, the link to the article is deactivated, but title and author information will remain, with an indication that the paper has been withdrawn.
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.