Unless you’ve been hiding under a digital rock, you’d know that the best browser in the world has released an even better incarnation: Firefox 3 is here. I could write about all of its improvements, but you can get a fuller version here, suffice it to say it runs faster, takes a lot less memory (20 tabs open suddenly takes about 300mg less RAM for me!) and has some spiffy new security features. And let’s not forget, it’s an open source creation, made by the people, for the people!
To celebrate, Mozilla are encouraging people to download Firefox 3 today, attempting to break the Guinness World Record for most downloaded software in a 24hour period. For those of us in Perth, that 24 hours runs from 1am Wed 18 June until 12.59am Thurs 19 June. So, be part of a World Record and download now! I was the 29005th person to download from Australia, so I know there are a few Aussies who could download yet! And just in case you need one last ounce of motivation, downloading FireFox 3 today will get you a cute little certificate:
Seriously: go download it now.
Open-access to scholarly research has been very topical the past few years. The internet as a means of communication and distribution seems to have led down to paths, increasingly divergent: either academic journals are going open-access, allowing anyone to read the contents; or, they're becoming part of large corporate conglomerates which charge university libraries (and very few others since they can't afford it) very large fees for access to all the journals in their catalogue. Graduate student and social networking guru danah boyd (yes, she spells her name without capital letters) has argued that academics need to form a united front and only publish in open-access journals. Here's what boyd proposes:
- Tenured Faculty and Industry Scholars: Publish only in open-access journals. Unlike younger scholars, you don't need the status markers because you're tenured or in industry. Use that privilege to help build new journals that are not strapped to broken business models. Help build the reputations of new endeavors so that they can be viable publishing venues for future scholars. Publish in open-access journals, build a personal webpage and add your article there. You will get much more visibility, especially from younger scholars who turn to Google before they go to the library. I understand that a lot of you prefer to flout the rules of these journals and publish your articles on your website anyhow, even when you're not allowed. The problem is that you're not helping change the system for future generations.
- Disciplinary associations: Help open-access journals gain traction. Encourage your members to publish in them. Run competitions for best open-access publications and have senior scholars write committee letters for younger scholars whose articles are stupendous but published in non-traditional venues.
- Tenure committees: Recognize alternate venues and help the universities follow. Younger scholars can't afford to publish in alternate venues until you begin recognizing the value of these publications. Help that process along and encourage your schools to do the same.
- Young punk scholars: Publish only in open-access journals in protest, especially if you're in a new field. This may cost you advancement or tenure, but you know it's the right thing to do. If you're an interdisciplinary scholar or in a new field, there aren't "respected" journals in your space and so you're going to have to defend yourself anyhow. You might as well use this opportunity to make the valued journals the open-access ones.
- More conservative young scholars: publish what you need to get tenure and then stop publishing in closed venues immediately upon acquiring tenure. I understand why you feel the need to follow the rules. This is fine, but make a point by stopping this practice the moment you don't need it.
- All scholars: Start reviewing for open-access journals. Help make them respected. Guest edit to increase the quality. Build their reputations through your involvement. Make these your priority so that the closed journals are the ones struggling to get quality reviewers.
- Libraries: Begin subscribing to open-access journals and adding them to your catalogue. Many of you do this, but not all. Open-access journals are free. Adding them to databases does costs money but it helps scholarship and will help you ween off of expensive journals in the long run.
- Universities: Support your faculty in creating open-access journals on your domains. You are respected institutions. The bandwidth cost of hosting a journal would be much less than allowing your undergrads access YouTube. Support your faculty in creating university-branded journals and work with them to run conferences and do other activities to help build the reputation of such nascent publications. If it goes well, your brand will gain status too.
- Academic publishers: Wake up or get out. Silencing the voices of academics is unacceptable. You're not helping scholarship or scholars. Find a new business model or leave the journal publishing world. You may be making money now, but your profits will not continue to grow using this current approach. Furthermore, I'd bank on academics shunning you within two generations. If you think more than a quarter ahead, you know that it's the right thing to do for business as well as for the future of knowledge.
(Read more here.) Personally, I commend boyd for her position. I must admit, as an early career researcher, I'd be hard pressed to turn down an opportunity to publish in a well-respected journal, even a very locked-down one; academic careers are that hard to build and maintain that lost opportunities are costly. However, I'd be delighted when we get to the stage that the most respected journals are open-access. In the meantime, I really hope that boyd's call is heard by our research leaders - I believe the push for open-access has to be top-led to be successful - and where I have any choice in the matter, open-access will be the way to go for me.
As the next generation of published scholars, what do you think? Does open-access matter to you?
Alex Halavais has posted a very useful set of Tips for academic job applications which, if you're even thinking about heading in that direction, you should read. All the points are worth thinking about, but I thought I'd highlight two. Firstly:
Teach. Even for Research I universities, the committee usually wants some indication that you are not a total disaster in the classroom. If you are a graduate student, do whatever you can to get your own class. At universities where this is impossible—or if you are mid-career—get a class at a local college. You won’t earn much money, but you will demonstrate that you are capable of leading a course. Naturally, if you are applying to a liberal arts college or another institution that emphasizes teaching, this becomes much more important, but no one wants to hire a full-time faculty member for a position where they will be having their first substantial teaching experience. This represents too great a risk.
UWA offers postgraduates a lot of opportunities to teach during candidature. Many disciplines employ postgrads as tutors, demonstrators and, at times, lecturers or course coordinators. Sure, these opportunities often slow the progress on your research, and should be balanced carefully, but if you're looking to become an academic, it's certain you'll be teaching and thus need to show you can teach in an interview process. Beyond casual teaching in your discipline, there is also the Postgraduate Teaching Internship Scheme and the Introduction to University Teaching programme, both of which are specifically about guiding postgrads through their first teaching experiences in a meaningful way which is directly linked to professional development. If you don't have time for either of these (the Internship lasts a full teaching year, while the Intro to Uni Teaching programme runs over a single semester), at least consider giving yourself a good primer on teaching basics by taking one of the 4-hour Seminars, Tutorials and Laboratories workshops offered at the beginning of each semester. Mixing professional development opportunities with your early teaching experiences isn't just good for your CV, it'll make teaching a lot more fun, and probably less stressful, too.
The other point from Halavais I wanted to mention is this:
Watch your web image. We’re hiring for an interactive communication position, and for something so closely related to the internet, you should expect that we are going to Google you. What do we find? Well, in some cases, we find a set of well-crafted websites by the applicant, as well as their appearance on other sites that are related, which gives us more to go on. In some cases, we only find references to their publications and presentations, which is fine; a solid second-place. Then there are applicants whose web designs leave something substantial to be desired. If you are applying for a job in interactive media, you shouldn’t have web pages that look like they were done by our least able undergraduates. They shouldn’t work only in Internet Explorer. They shouldn’t—if at all possible—be broken. (I realize, I’m throwing stones from a fairly glassy house here, but there it is.)
While Halavais is talking about a position that is related to digital culture, I'd argue that your web image will be increasingly important for all academic job applications in the coming years. Do you have your own web presence? That is, after all, what these blogs on MyResearchSpace are all about. If you're not got a web presence and you're thinking of working in academia, perhaps it's worth your while establishing your own online profile and identity!
It would appear that the University of New South Wales (UNSW) has the dubious honours of being the first Australian university to have their own YouTube channel. In the past couple of months, there have been a number of reports of US universities setting up on YouTube. For example, this article from News.com on UC Berkeley's channel:
YouTube is now an important teaching tool at UC Berkeley.
The school announced on Wednesday that it has begun posting entire course lectures on the Web's No.1 video-sharing site.
Berkeley officials claimed in a statement that the university is the first to make full course lectures available on YouTube. The school said that over 300 hours of videotaped courses will be available at youtube.com/ucberkeley.
Berkeley said it will continue to expand the offering. The topics of study found on YouTube included chemistry, physics, biology and even a lecture on search-engine technology given in 2005 by Google cofounder Sergey Brin.
"UC Berkeley on YouTube will provide a public window into university life, academics, events and athletics, which will build on our rich tradition of open educational content for the larger community," said Christina Maslach, UC Berkeley's vice provost for undergraduate education in a statement.
Similarly excited press has greeted other US universities,
this article on the University of Southern California's channel (
Via). However, the I think educational administrator and web 2.0 aficionado Greg Whitby notes probably wins the most excited prize for
his take on the UNSW channel (
Via):
While it’s a great marketing strategy, it recognises where today’s students are. Although the channel will broadcast some lecturers in an attempt to reach potential students, it captures the ubquitous nature and popularity of Web 2.0.
This is the democratisation of knowledge - no longer contained within lecture theatres or classrooms but shared. Learning becomes accessible, anywhere, anytime. Transportable, transparent, relevant and exciting.
The University of NSW is to be applauded but we still lag behind. iTunes has developed a store dedicated to education called University. It’s ‘the campus that never sleeps’ - allowing universities across the US to upload audio/video lectures, interviews, debates, presentations for students - any age, anywhere. And it’s free. It’s astounding and exciting to think that a cohort of students and teachers from a school western Sydney can watch a biology lecture from MIT.
The challenge for us is to open our K-12 classrooms to a new audience - to share knowledge as professionals and to showcase quality learning and teaching as we move from isolated classrooms to a connected global learning environment.
Readers of any of my blogs will know I'm also an advocate for integrating certain web 2.0 tools into learning and teaching. However, these announcements seem oddly familiar to me - it's just like the press that came out as pretty much every university in the world embraced podcasting one after another, each pushing out press releases about embracing the future. However, what didn't happen half as readily was the pedagogical discussion about how podcasting should or could be used in education. Nor, I have to say, are we seeing much interrogation of the use of online video via YouTube or other services. Let me be clear: there is certainly value in using YouTube in particular ways in education. However, as I argued about podcasting in the past, it's probably more important to focus on working out new ways to engage students (such as having them create content for podcasting or to post on YouTube) rather than primarily just replicating the top-down structures of lecture delivery. (I don't have a problem with recorded lectures, I should add -I think Lectopia is a fantastic service for students - I just don't think that's all we should worry about.)
It's also worth keeping in mind that YouTube is a two-way street as demonstrated by clips of teachers at their worst appearing on YouTube.
[Cross-posted from my eLearning blog.]
Michael Wesch and his 200 students in ANTH 200: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, Spring 2007 collaborated in exploring what exactly a student does these days. Their results make a fascinating video and a timely reminder of the way (some) student experiences are changing:
Some of the noteworthy results from 133 of the students survey included:
- “My average class size is 115.”
- “18% of my teachers know my name.”
- I complete 49% of the readings assigned to me. Only 26% … relative to my life
- I will read 8 books this year.” “2300 web pages” “and 1281 facebook profiles”
- “I will write 42 pages for class this semester.” “And over 500 pages of email”
Given how many times Wesch's first video, 'The Machine is Us/ing Us', has been used to discuss Web 2.0, I suspect this video may very well find itself as part of the conversations we have in rethinking student engagement in the twenty-first century.
[88Mb .wmv version downloadable here.]
[Cross-posted from my eLearning blog.]
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As readers of my main blog will know, I spent Friday at the Australian Blogging Conference at QUT's Creative Industries Precinct in Brisbane. It was a fabulous, stimulating and intellectually rich conference and a great end to Tama's-month-o-conferencing. I was the facilitator for the 'Blogging and Education' session so thought, in the spirit of the conference, I'd better get my notes up here:
Blogs and Education
The session ran for two hours, with a good balance between K-12 educators and those of us from the Higher Ed sector. After a brief (well, brief for me) introduction, the session was loosely structured around three main questions...
Why blog in education?
The Pros
* Allowing students to connect with community, family and an intellectual arena beyond the boundaries of the classroom.
* While most educational institutions have some sort of Learning Management System (such as Blackboard), the architecture of these systems tends to be inward-focusing, getting students thinking that everything they need is inside the walls of the black box. Blogging, by contrast, is outwardly-focused and keeps students focused on the broader (potential) public or audience they may be writing for. Thus, if we're teaching life-long skills, blogs are often better platforms, due to their openness, than other closed systems.
* Blogs can meaningfully extend the educational experience, giving students a space to engage, write and communicate beyond the tutorial room. The uptake of this opportunity will often be uneven, but it's often the less confident students who flourish in blogged communication.
* in certain contexts, blogs can become 'student property' once a particular unit of course is over, thus allowing students to continue to build and use their blogs (this clearly differs depending on the context and aim of an educational blog, and on the age of the participants).
* Blogging as an ethos is about sharing knowledge, building ties and acknowledging the input of others - all key characteristics of good pedagogy!
The Cons
* Having purchased the (usually quite expensive) Learning Management System, the majority of schools and universities invest most of the training, support and infrastructure costs to maintain the hardware and use of this system. Blogging is thus often done using peripheral tools which educators must teach themselves to use rather than getting central support.
* Many institutions desire to contain and control everything that students are producing, both in terms of protecting student privacy and in terms of protecting institutional intellectual property or even just keeping work away from outside scrutiny. While this can be overcome, it's often IT and central policies which have to be convinced and converted to make the use of blogs (and other web 2.0 tools) feasible.
* At times education in Australia is still focused on the idea of a digital divide - where the aim is to get every student access to a computer - whereas the meaningful discussion needs, really, to shift to the idea of the participation gap - where the focus needs to be on ensuring all students are familiar with network and digital literacies, thus being able the meaningfully utilise social software and other tools, which is a lot more than just having occasional access to the internet.
* The mythos of the digital natives tends to scare many educators because it suggests that many younger people (dubbed digital natives as they've never know a world without the internet) will always have more familiarity than their teachers (who are dubbed digital immigrants since the web appeared at some point during their lifetime) and thus teachers are worried about not being knowledgeable in these areas.
Examples and reflections?
K-12 Examples
* Year one 'Little Gems' blog - Amanda Rablin demonstrated this outstanding blog by year one students (!) which not only broadened their classroom experience, but also showed a level of reflexivity well beyond the primary school level!
* PodKids Australia - From a year 4/5 class in a WA country town who have used podcasting (and their blog) to communicate with their parents and the wider world in a sensible, thoughtful and safe manner.
Higher Ed Examples
* Self.Net Tutorial (Monday 2pm) blog - An example of a blog used to expand the engagement of students in the tutorial process, and extend their potential interaction beyond the confines of the classroom.
* iGeneration Honours Unit blogs - A full university unit where the entire curriculum is online (collaboratively constructed by the unit coordinator and the students) as well as all of the students work - which include critical evaluations of blogs and podcasts as the major assessment item - and the week-by-week tutorials in the course.
* Communication Studies 1101 link blog - the least exciting of all the examples, but nevertheless useful, this blog is simply a series of links to useful material for students in a first-year Communication Studies course at UWA.
(All three Higher Ed examples use Creative Commons licenses to make legally explicit the intention that students' content can be build-upon by others, on the condition of citation. I was particularly pleased to see both Elliott Bledscoe and Jessica Coates from Creative Commons Australia in this session!)
Missing from these examples was the best use of blogging as per blogging as a participatory cultural form which is a course-length blog maintained across the three to five years of a degree. One good example I've found now that the session is over is Sarah Demicoli's Looking Up? blog; notably Sarah is a student in Adrian Miles' Labsome Honours cohort.
Should academics blog?
This question ended up being divided into two parts: should K-12 teachers blog, and should academics (and doctoral students) blog? The first question proved far more complicated in that there is an expectation that teachers in the K-12 environment will share less of their personal lives with the world. The accountability that comes with being a teacher - especially from parental expectations - means it's something of a challenge to share too much of a teacher's life publicly, less it be seen and critiqued by parents or students. Likewise, the important line between teachers and students was one of those areas where teachers need to be especially careful when using social networks like Facebook or MySpace because 'friending' students might inadvertently be read as entering into a social dynamic with students which is generally something of a taboo. Some folks felt this was particularly complicated since some teachers using social networks might be less familiar with the social norms of the platforms and accidentally cross a line - or be perceived to cross a line - by accident. Sadly, excessive accountability seems to be one of the major reasons that teachers would be hesitant to blog - or at least only blog on a narrow band of topics. That said, there was still a sense that teachers would blog if they found the right reason or topic, but that the boundaries as to what other personal information would find its way online would be a very solid boundary indeed!
On the 'should academics blog?' front, things were decidedly more optimistic. There was a strong sense that academic blogs were a rich source of information, insight and commentary and that these were often far more accessible than other forms of academic writing. I asked a particularly loaded question - should academics feel obliged to blog since in publicly funded institutions the onus is to share our thoughts, research and ideas with the public, not just a our peers via peer viewed gatekeeping - and a few people were enthused by this idea, although there were a few comments about the need to have peer review before academic ideas escape into the world. The confusion surrounding danah boyd's MySpace/Facebook class paper, and her subsequent reflections on the process, proved a useful example. That said, the biggest boundary to academic blogging seemed to be the amount of time it might take, but most people in the session thought it was time well spent!
I should add that these notes are re-constituted from rather poorly recorded keywords during the session, so further reflections, comments and notes on this session are most definitely welcome!
The Rest of the Conference
I don't have terribly detailed notes from the other sessions I attended (which might be a blessing since caught the red-eye from Perth the night before the conference was thus a little less than coherent in the morning sessions), but thankfully being a blogged event, there are plenty of posts about the conference worth reading. Reflections well worth reading include those from Senator Andrew Bartlett, Australia's most web-savvy politician. Derek Barry has posted three detailed reports on the Morning Panel discussion, The Politics of Blogging session and the panel on Citizen Journalism. Mark Bahnisch, one of the Politics of Blogging facilitators, has also posted on the 'state of political blogging' specifically for that session. Robyn Rebollo has notes from the conference which include reflections on the Legal Issues and Blogs session. Nick Hodge was one of the facilitators for the Business Blogging session and has posted both his notes and powerpoint slides. Likewise, Joanne Jacobs has some useful notes from The Future of Blogging closing session, and Kate Davis' notes from the parallel 'Building a Better Blog' session are useful, too. Conference notes and reports keep emerging, so watch the blogoz tag on Technorati for more.
I should say, as well, that I was fortunate enough to catch up with a whole bunch of folk I've known through blogging, social networks, shared research interests and so on, but never actually met in the flesh before. It was great chatting with Brian Fitzgerald, Jessica Coates and Rachel Cobcroft, as well as Elliot Bledscoe who I met a few weeks earlier, all of whom are part of the Creative Commons Australia team, which Brian leads. Given their enthusiasm and energy, I'm sure CC Australia has a lot going on in the future, and with any luck I'll be involved with some of the CC and Education things as they emerge. I also chatted to Melissa Gregg, Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns, all of whom are blogosphere friends who its nice to see annually (or thereabouts) at conferences. Quite unexpectedly, I ran into Sarah Xu who I've met through local fannish events, but I hadn't realised she'd landed in sunny BrisVegas to write her doctorate, which is creatively exploring the important question: "how can cyberfeminist practice and Web 2.0 applications be used to recode gendered representations of women on the Internet?" Sounds like a thesis worth watching!
Finally, a huge congratulations to Peter Black who put the conference together and assembled a fascinating group of people to participate in some really meaningful exchanges! Time to start planning for next year ...
[Cross-posted from my main blog.]
The talk I have during the PSA's Research week on 'Creating an Online Presence During Candidature' is now online, complete with slides and audio, thanks to Lectopia. At 36:45 in to the presentation, I talk explicitly about MyResearchSpace and what it offers UWA's research students. If you're not sure if you're getting the most out of MyRS, why don't you have a listen?
So, if you were attending a talk called 'Creating an online presence during candidature', what exactly would you want to know? Rather than this being some vague question, it's a very real one, as I've agreed to talk on this topic at next week's Research Careers Week for research students. I've got some ideas - how to make connections with researchers using blogs; how to use your own blog as a promotional and networking tool for you and your work; the importance of trying to publish in open-access online journals; and a quick overview of MyResearchSpace - but I'm sure there are other obvious or interesting things I've not thought of! So, if you've got any suggestions, ideas or the like, please leave a comment here! Thanks!
By the way, the session will take place between 1.00 and 2.00pm on Thursday, 13th September in the Tattersall Lecture Theatre. For a programme of everything else going in Research Career Week, check out the PSA's website.
Typos can really ruin almost anything if you let them. As they say, a picture paints a thousand words ...
If you don't get why this is funny immediately, then you need to watch more of The Simpsons. (Brought to you by Tama's wacky brain and The Customer Keyboard Generator.)
Chuck tagged me a few days ago with the Eight Things meme; although I'm generally fairly anti-meme, I've been enjoying a bit of back and forth with Chuck in his blog and on del.icio.us, so figured I could add one more procrastination on a writing day. Apparently, I have to start with rules ...
Rules:
1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged write their own blog post about their eight things and include these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged and that they should read your blog.
Eight Facts about Me:
1. When I was in Primary School I won a Lego building competition; this is, without a doubt, my fondest memory of the first 7 years of education.
2. Apart from The Goonies, the film that rattled around my brain the most when I was a kid was called Explorers. I was fascinated how three boys could essentially make a spacecraft out of everyday junk (and a little piece of alien technology). In retrospect, this example of making something amazing from the bits and pieces others leave lying around resonates with some of the way I view the internet and participatory culture (and until I looked it up on IMDb to link to for this post, I hadn't realised River Phoenix was one of the kids).
3. When I was twelve years old I joined Perth's Doctor Who fan club, The West Lodge, which was my first proper immersion into fandom; I attend the local science-fiction convention in the following year (Swancon 14) but found the whole thing rather intimidating and didn't get back to Swancon until seven years later when Neil Gaiman visited Perth as GoH in 1996.
4. I have re-read all six of Frank Herbert's Dune books as a series at least twenty times since I was 14; I've been relatively unimpressed by the prequel novels in the past few years.
5. My sister and I both have PhDs and are the first members of our family to ever attend university at all. My sister is eighteen months younger, started her thesis a year after I did, but we both were officially given our PhDs at the same graduation ceremony.
6. Emily and I currently live less than 14 metres from Subiaco Oval, which is where Australian Rules Football attracts 40-45,000 people most weekends. Despite AFL being Australia's national winter sport, I've never been to a Football game.
7. Until last Saturday I had never test-driven a car, having bought my only owned vehicle to date from my parents. On Saturday I test-drove a Prius which Emily and I are seriously considering buying despite the fact it will take us several years to pay it off.
8. In the proposal for my PhD thesis in 2000, the final chapter was supposed to look at the use of computer-generated imagery and special effects in nature documentaries as a case study of artificial culture where natural and technological meaning merged together. (It never got written because after that proposal both September 11 2001 and the Spider-Man films happened, and I used the latter to interrogate the cultural impact of the former.)
You're It! I now tag the following people (hoping at least a few will play along): Karen, Sanna, Sky, Robyn, David, Wayne, Matthew and Eleanor.
(Yes, before anyone point it out, this is a re-post from the personal blog; I still think I can tag 8 different people here because this blog is for a different purpose and is read by different folks! :P And, yes, I am supposed to be finishing off another article which I why I've suddenly been answering memes!)
Yesterday, Karen called me a geek. She's right; but I suspect a fair few postgrad bloggers are in the geekerly way, too, but: can you prove it? Here's evidence of my uber-geekery...
If you've got the same tool, can you out-geek me? :)
Warning: Segue into politics and digital communication...
What is Facebook? Should you care? Does the fact that John Howard and Kevin Rudd (or their team) have Facebook pages mean anything about Australian politics in a digital era? If any of these questions have perked your interest, click here. (At the very least you might enjoy seeing which of John Howard's three profiles are fake!)
PS If anyone would prefer to take this post as a provocation to think about whether social networking (like Facebook, or even the way MyRS is used for some folk) is a good thing for postgraduate researchers, feel free!
Given that Robyn's been sharing her heightened enthusiasm for various eResearch tools and David's been talking about some of the eResearch (or, at least, digital communication about eResearch) options already available, I thought I'd throw in an idea I've been thinking about for a while, which is an ePrint archive. In the simplest terms, a UWA ePrint Archive would house digital copies of the work of UWA academics and research students; while a straight-forward idea, in practice this raises all sorts of intellectual property and copyright issues. In simple terms, it seems sensible that we should be able to keep a self-archived copy of articles, conference papers and chapters that we write. In the past, general practice has been to assign copyright to whoever publishes our work, and that's that (with the standard expectation that you can re-publish, usually fee-free, in as part of a larger monograph written by you).
However, given all of the digital tools now available for archiving, sharing and distributing information of any kind, there are a lot of new options. Setting up an archive of word documents, PDFs and other digital formats of written and recorded works poses no real technical challenge; the best issues are legal. To answer this challenge, increasingly universities are encouraging their researchers to keep 'pre-prints' of their work and self-archive them centrally. So, what's a pre-print you ask? Here's a good description from QUT's ePrint Archive:
A preprint is the version of an academic paper which is submitted by an author for peer review (to a journal or conference). This version may be revised by the author as a result of comments made by reviewers.
A postprint is the final version of an academic paper, incorparating [sic] the revisions made as a result of the peer review process or as accepted for publication if no changes were made.
Spelling aside, this seems like quite an exciting idea for ensuring that your work can be shared with others. Even if your paper appears in a journal only available in hardcopy (or extremely expensive-to-access digital repositories), putting your pre-prints in a central archive that is open-access (ie anyone using a web browser can access it) would probably extend your potential readership greatly. But ... is it legal? Lets ask QUT again:
When any new work is created, the author or creator holds the copyright and is free to give away or sell copies, on-paper or on-line (e.g., by self-archiving). This means that the author can legally self-archive a paper they are about to submit to a journal for peer review and possible publication. This version is known as a preprint.
When authors submit the paper to a journal, they are often asked to assign copyright to the publisher. This contract refers to the final, peer-reviewed version (the postprint). If all rights are assigned to the publisher, this version of the paper cannot be legally self-archived without publisher permission.
However, it is not always necessary to assign all rights to the publisher. See Copyright Matters for more information and tips on how to retain the right to self-archive your work.
So, if we actually take the time to carefully read the copyright releases we sign - and maybe ask for changes now and then to allow us to archive pre-print - it should be feasible to create a robust UWA ePrint archive. Moreover, for those of use already publishing online and in open-access journals, this would be another useful mechanism to index and highlight our work. Sure, UWA has Socrates which will be used to store data about publications (mainly for RQF compliance), but lets be bolder than that and try and get as much of our work online and freely-accessible as we can!
Now the big question: would you use a UWA ePrint archive?