Helping Researchers Understand and Label Article Versions: VERSIONS Toolkit Released

The VERSIONS (Versions of Eprints—A User Requirements Study and Investigation Of the Need for Standards) project has released the VERSIONS Toolkit.

Here's an excerpt from the "Introduction":

If you are an experienced researcher you are likely to be disseminating your work on a personal website, in a subject archive, or in an institutional repository already. This toolkit aims to:

  • provide peer-to-peer advice about managing personal versions and revisions in order to keep your options open for future use of your work
  • clarify areas of uncertainty among researchers about agreements with publishers and how these relate to different versions of research outputs
  • suggest ways to identify your work clearly when placing it on the web in order to guide your readers to the latest and best versions of your work
  • direct you to further resources about making versions of your work openly accessible

The toolkit draws on the results of a survey of researchers’ attitudes and current practice when creating, storing and disseminating different versions of their research. As such the guidance in the toolkit represents the views of active researchers. Survey respondents were predominantly from economics and related disciplines.