General Orientation
Social cognition is the subfield of social psychology that studies the mental representations and processes that underlie social perception, social judgment, and social influence. For purposes of this archive, we define it broadly. Roughly, any paper that you might consider submitting to the first section (Attitudes and Social Cognition) of JPSP or to the journal Social Cognition is welcome here.
Why a paper archive? Science depends on communication among researchers. Many of us send out our latest
work on paper to ten or 20 of our friends, but this does not cover even 1% of
the active researchers in the field, and perhaps not even a major fraction of those who would be
interested in our work. Making papers available in electronic form on demand eases the burden on authors (who don't have to make photocopies and put things in the mail) and on those who
want to make use of their work (because they can go to one place to find a paper, rather than looking in file cabinets, trying to contact authors, etc.). If you want to get an idea of how a really active paper archive works, check out the
Physics Archive at xxx.lanl.gov.
What about copyright? Since April 1, 1989, everything you create privately is protected by copyright.
This is true whether or not you register it and whether or not you include an explicit copyright
notice on the document. (Including a copyright notice may make it easier to collect monetary damages if someone infringes on your copyright, but the likelihood
of getting damages for an academic paper is pretty slim anyway.) Allowing people to obtain copies of your writings from an electronic archive is no different, legally, from sending out copies on paper:
neither action waives your rights under the copyright law. Basically, in either case people are permitted only to make "fair use" of your work (which includes typical research purposes).
So if you would be willing to send people copies of your work on paper, there is no reason not to make your paper available in an electronic archive. Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, nor
do I play one on TV.
To return to the Social Cognition Archive home page, click here.