Academese is an attempt to allow free access of information that might otherwise be left as 1′s and 0′s on an old laptop. The goal is to get users to upload their old school papers, projects, or completed but unpublished studies in order to allow access to all. It’s an electronic journal of academia of sorts, with the goal of covering all topics of potential interest.
One goal of this site is to allow research papers written for a school course to be seen by someone other than the instructor or TA. An argument can be made that this may lead to an increase in plagiarism, but there are quite a few reasons this is not a substantial concern. The papers that are submitted here should represent a unique line of thought or reasoning, so wholesale plagiarism should be as likely as with any other electronic resource. Hopefully the collection of papers and ideas this site presents will create a unique resource for students and scholars, leading to larger dissemination of ideas. As with any source, these papers can be referenced and their ideas built upon by other researchers. The ability for students to tag the university and course a paper was written for allows the reader to know the overarching topic the paper is concerned with, and will allow current students a reference for how former students approached a specific topic. While the potential for plagiarism is always present when disseminating ideas, there is no reason to believe it should be more so with one electronic collection of thoughts or ideas than another.
Another goal of the site is to address the “file drawer” problem. This is where a study is completed, but for one reason or another deemed unpublishable and placed the file drawer where it remains. There are many reasons this might occur, such as results not having the “wow” factor that seems necessary in the current world of publishing. If this study is the logical next step in the progression of a field, though, this can lead to the same research to be completed by another, and another. If everyone places these studies in the file drawer, these dead ends continue to propagate. Communicating the results of an interesting study, even (or perhaps especially) if the results were not as expected, is an important facet of research, and one that we should be focusing on in the digital age without the page limits of paper journals.
One might ask what good is this concept without peer review? The custom in academia is to have papers pre-screened by those knowledgeable in the topic, to arbitrate what information flows through valid research methods to reach its conclusions. This method was necessary when resources were limited (such as the number of pages in a volume), and what has been written is indelible. The digital age offers with it the ability for real time, ongoing peer review (one might argue this is more stringent!), where methodological concerns can be allayed for all to see and learn from.
Feel free to create an account and upload your papers. If the subject category of your paper is not listed, load it as ‘uncategorized’, place the topic in the keyword section, and if you’d like, leave a message under the contact page, and it will be added.