About OT Repository

OT Repository Policies

About

The OT Repository (OTR) builds upon the framework for electronic archiving established by its predecessor, the Rutgers Optimality Archive. The purpose of OTR is to facilitate the exchange of research results in Optimality Theory and conceptually affiliated approaches and to facilitate the dissemination of Optimality Theory-related research tools and teaching resources. OTR is open to all who want to make their work in Optimality Theory and related theories of grammar available to the research community.

Submission Guidelines

OTR accepts submissions from faculty, students, and independent scholars. OTR accepts papers, reviews, monographs, and dissertations in .pdf format. It also accepts handouts and slides submitted in .pdf format, as long as they are detailed enough to allow full reconstruction of claims and arguments. Works posted to OTR are unedited and unreviewed. Submissions containing only an abstract will not be accepted. If you are submitting large files over 5GB, please contact the moderators at otrepository@wustl.edu prior to submission. 

Publication Status

The OT Repository adopts the same view of the purpose and status of electronic archiving as the Rutgers Optimality Archive, quoted below:

“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.”

Content Moderation

All submissions made to OTR are subject to moderation. OTR reserves the right to decline any submission. Reasons for declining a submission may include, but are not limited to: 

  • Materials lacking relevance, originality, or significance
  • Materials representing falsified and/or plagiarized content and/or content generated by Artificial Intelligence
  • Materials outside of the formats specified in the submission guidelines
  • Materials covering subjects outside of Optimality Theory and its conceptual affiliates

Archiving and Hosting

Submissions that successfully make it through content moderation will be posted on OTR. As part of the archiving process, WashU Libraries agrees to: 

  • Assign your submission a DOI
  • Provide free online hosting of your submission as long as OTR is operational 

OTR is not a journal and does not evaluate the scientific quality of submissions. Content moderation and acceptance to OTR does not stand in for the peer review process. 

Rights and Permissions

Contributors to OTR are required to make their work open access by selecting a Creative Commons license, which allows others to copy, distribute, and make some use of their material without the need for permission.

Contributors to OTR retain all copyright and related rights to submitted materials and are free to submit their material elsewhere. Contributors grant Washington University in St. Louis a non-exclusive license to host and distribute deposited material(s). 

Author Responsibilities

Although many journals do not consider preprints to be prior publications, some still do. It is the author’s responsibility to determine if submitting to OTR precludes them from simultaneous or subsequent submission to their journal of choice.

By submitting to OTR, authors assert that they have obtained the right to use any third-party materials included in their submission.

For work with multiple authors, all co-authors must give permission to the submitting author prior to submitting to OTR. Should a co-author notify OTR that they did not authorize the posting of the work, OTR moderators will take the following steps:

Moderators will attempt to work with all co-authors to address the issue. Depending on whether or not an agreement is reached, the following outcomes will occur: 

  • If an agreement can be reached, OTR will continue posting the original work or accept a revised version – whichever the authors prefer to resolve the dispute;
  • If no agreement can be reached, OTR will remove the work.

Citation

Papers obtained through OTR should be cited using the following format: 

LastName, FirstName. Preprint title. OT Repository (yyyy). https://doi.org/00000.

Revision and Withdrawal

Authors with an updated version of their work may submit it as a new submission to OTR and must include a cross-reference to the original paper. 

At the author's request, a paper may be withdrawn from OTR. The author must request the withdrawal within 7 days of the paper being posted, and the author must include rationale for the withdrawal. Withdrawal requests will be considered by OTR moderators on a case-by-case basis. In the event of withdrawal, the work will no longer be available, but the metadata will remain, with an indication that the paper has been withdrawn.

Licensing info: Parts of this licensing agreement, including the “Author Responsibilities” section, are adapted from EarthArXiv Moderation and Terms of Use version 2.9. EarthArXiv Moderation and Terms of Use version 2.9 are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License.