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Hi Jay. This is Margaret. I’m a little stuffy today but I’m at my parents’ house and
I wanted to finally—okay—I wanted to finally offer some thoughts on why one might post
a paper online. I think this is really important. And it’s something that I’ve given a huge
amount of thought to over the last several years because I’ve been posting a lot of
my own conference presentations, particularly on my website. It’s okay, Mom. My mom was
just closing the front door incredibly silently because we’re like, in production. When
I first started posting conference presentations on my website, I was really apprehensive about
it, because I honestly thought People were going to steal my work. What I found to be
true, kind of to my surprise, Was the opposite. I found that people were much more likely
to cite my work ,because they had it available and they could see exactly what I had said
and they had this sort of concrete place to link to. So instead of being kind of misrepresented,
which I found to be more often the case when I just presented my ideas orally and then
took off, I found that people would quote me at more length, you know, they would present
my work in more context, because they had the context available. And they would typically
cite me by linking back to my website. That created a new set of challenges for me, because
I had to be clear with myself about what my website was supposed to be. If it really was
going to be an archive for my work, then I had to figure out some way that that work
would exist on that site relatively stably, so that things wouldn’t keep appearing and
disappearing. And that project for me is still somewhat in flux. I don’t have, you know,
a brilliant and beautiful website that’s extremely stable and works perfectly. It’s
a little bit of a work in progress. But the feedback that I get from people who go back
there and look at my work and link to it is just invaluable. I find that putting the work
up there really creates a kind of conversation of the sort that I would not have at a conference
if I were just coming in, delivering the work orally, and leaving. Another reason that I
have found it helpful to present my work on my website is that it actually has resulted
in invitations to do various things. People can find me more easily. Part of the reason
for this is that my own website is on Wordpress, which is a very available, searchable kind
of website, so when people are googling for keywords that are close to the work that I
do, they do relatively often stumble upon my website. And I can tell that this is happening
because Wordpress also offers a pretty good set of analytics, so you can tell who’s
searching for your website, and what words they’re using. Or who’s searching for
something related to your work, and what words they’re using. So I find that I get invited
to speak places, or I get asked to take part in projects, because people run across my
work that’s posted. Another reason that—I mean, well, the reason that I personally started
posting stuff on my website was actually just sort of straight-up accessibility. I wanted
people to have access to copies, and I didn’t always want to be dragging multiple copies
to the conference venue. I didn’t always know how many people would be in attendance.
I didn’t necessarily know that everyone who needed a copy would necessarily have the
visual capabilities to be scanning a print copy. I wanted people to potentially be able
to mull over the talk for a couple of days and then come back to me with a question.
Those were the avenues that I wanted to open up when I initially started posting papers.
So the additional benefits that came to me, which were that I seem to be cited more often,
cited more accurately, and be a little better networked were all bonuses that I hadn’t
necessarily anticipated.