To support a global community of scholars committed to the study of contemplative practice, the Journal of Contemplative Studies(JCS) offers a free pre- and post-print archival service, ContemplativeRxiv. This service is devoted to facilitating dynamic collaboration and discussion in the field of Contemplative Studies, as per the Focus and Scope of the JCS. Authors can quickly and easily make their work available for discussion and citation, while the site also serves as an archive for related articles. The platform enables authors to submit an article at any stage of the authoring process: before an article is submitted for peer-review, after an article has been peer-reviewed, or if an article will not be submitted for publication. We welcome articles that are not intended to be published within the JCS itself, though we encourage prospective submissions to JCS to consider preprint posting in ContemplativeRxiv.
As we help to build a scholarly community with deep expertise, we vet authors for the ability to submit articles for review as well as to make comments on other people’s work, which is optional. Participants can therefore assume all comments are serious and any articles available for review are rigorous.
Preprints allow scholars to share their scholarly work prior to publication for others to provide feedback on, and ideally become the subject of wide-ranging and lively dialogue. An advantage of posting an article before it is submitted to the JCS or other journals for peer-review includes receiving and responding to critical and constructive feedback from the scholarly community. This enables an author to improve their article before it undergoes formal peer-review, and hence, likely making the paper more publishable. An author may choose to keep an article up to elicit and receive feedback after the peer-review process. Because the preprint platform does not possess the formatting and other accouterments of a published article, authors can quickly and easily render their work discoverable without being reliant on review or publication timelines.
Advantages of a preprint are:
Once an article is published, the platform serves as an archive for both preprint versions of articles and published articles. Even after the peer-review process, an author may choose to keep an article up on the archive to receive additional feedback. The author can choose to take down a pre-published paper or leave it online — though our expectation for published articles is that the comments are part of a permanent record in the archive.