The Archive for Religion & Cognition

Introduction


Goals and background

The goal of the Archive for Religion & Cognition (ARC) is to create a forum that enhances research in the field of the cognitive science of religion (CSR) by promoting communication between researchers, as well as facilitating the first steps of newcomers to this emerging paradigm. We believe that a twenty-first century scientific approach calls for a twenty-first century way of doing science, and by the present initiative we hope to contribute to the creation of a living virtual research community. (An interesting article on electronic archives in science.).

ARC, created by Tamás Bíró, is offered to the research community by the Centre for Religion & Cognition with the support of the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion (IACSR).

The Archive for Religion & Cognition contains books, theses, dissertations, book chapters, articles, conference papers, handouts and discussion papers on work in progress in the field of CSR. The database -- that is, the authors, titles, abstracts, etc. but not the full texts -- can be searched. Every scholar is invited to submit new items to the Archive.

The webmaster's acknowledgments are due to ROA, which served as an example of how to create a research community around a new paradigm in the era of the Internet. ROA itself follows the precedent of http://xxx.lanl.gov/ collecting e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science and Quantitative Biology.

As mentioned in the ROA policies: "Archiving is not a form of publication. By accepted academic convention, well-established in the hard sciences, electronic archiving is completely independent of publication, future or prior. It is the equivalent of mailing out a typescript, pre-print, or off-print to colleagues. 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."

Conditions of use

Uploading is free of charge or obligation, but the following conditions must be met:

  1. Items must be uploaded preferably by the author, but in any case with the consent of the author (of all authors).
  2. Copyright must not be violated (see below).
  3. Items must meet all criteria of a scholarly work, such as ideological neutrality and avoiding plagiarism.
  4. Items must be relevant to the cognitive science of religion.
  5. Uploaded files will be available as submitted, without any editing.

Submissions must be most strictly in accordance with the rules of copyright. In case you do not own, or you are uncertain whether you own the copyright of your paper, you should submit only the bibliographical data of your work, as well as a link to the publisher's website where those having a subscription to the electronic version of the journal can download it. You can post your contact details so that the interested can ask you to send a pre-print or an off-print. Submitting the traditional bibliographical details only is also possible, but the visibility of the paper is reduced in this case.

Items must be relevant to the cognitive science of religion. Ideas about a religious perspective on science or attempts to combine science with religion will be rejected. We also discourage submissions in the psychology of religion at large, as ARC focuses on the cognitive science of religion, which is a different field, even if they overlap significantly.

Downloading is also free of charge or obligation and is completely anonymous. Readers must know that papers are unedited and not reviewed. The Archive is open to anyone in the scholarly community.

Citation of papers obtained from ARC (or also available from ARC) should at least mention the Archive for Religion & Cognition, the ARC-number, and the URL of ARC. For instance:

John Smith (2006). An article on religion and cognition. ARC-111, Archive for Religion & Cognition, http://www.csr-arc.com/.
Charles Smith (2006). Another article. Journal for CSR 2 (3):33-44. Also: ARC-613, Archive for Religion & Cognition, http://www.csr-arc.com/.

Revision: Papers may be updated and removed any time. Please contact us if you wish to do so. The fact that a paper has been updated will be mentioned in the "remark" field. In the case of removed papers, only the ARC-number, the author and the title will be retained with a note in the "remark" field about the paper having been removed.

Legal disclaimer

All documents available from this server may be protected under the Copyright Laws of some country or other legal system. Permission to reproduce may be required.

Acknowledgments

Tamás Bíró wishes to thank all authors of PHP and MySQL for developing such great tools; the Rutgers Optimality Archive for the idea; István Czachesz and Bea Nink for useful comments; and many more people.

Where to start:

Search in the Archive for Religion & Cognition:

(to obtain all items in the archive, leave all fields "please choose"):

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Webmaster: Tamás Bíró