Would you like others to read your work? At no cost you can make it available today. Take your writings and put them on the web, using the excellent “Education-line” facility. This service allows teachers, researchers and other educationists to place their articles into a public database. It is managed by the British Education Index in Leeds University Library with funding from the Electronic Libraries Programme.
More than 1,000 documents are already stored at this site and anyone looking for articles that mention homework, for example, would find 57 papers. You can either look at each one in turn or narrow the search by only summoning those papers that also mention another key word, such as “secondary”.
The site holds a wide variety of articles from politicians’ speeches to academic papers.
Articles are not refereed before they appear and Education-line does not replace journals and other publications. It simply provides a facility for rapid dissemination.
Writers may be wary of submitting material that they want to publish elsewhere - some journals are precious about the provenance of papers. This is an uncertain area but Education-line does not ask authors to surrender copyright.
The web site is http:www.leeds.ac.ukeducol Readers might also like to look at www.leeds.ac.ukeducolcall1.htm which gives information about a major initiative to improve access to paper and electronic research literature through the British Education Index and Education-line.
Peter Tymms is Reader in Education, University of Durham www.cem.dur.ac.ukpips
