One fundamental issue be decided upon is the breadth of licenses to be allowed at Hephaistos Text Working Papers. I see good arguments in favor of demanding one of the standard Creative Commons licenses, which offer clear choices for authors, clearly state the terms of use for end–users, and are in–tune with Hephaistos Text's mission. On the other hand, I like the idea of authors having a maximum of choice in the selection of license. If it is decided that traditional copyright licenses are desirable, then possible legal issues might arise if Hephaistos Text wishes to keep posted material up long–term, for reasons of citability. (On this latter issue, see the How to Cite discussion.) And what about other copyleft licenses, such as the GNU General Public License (GPL) and GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPLv3)?

For the first post, I would like to open up discussion of how, or if, Hephaistos Text Working Papers should recommend readers' citation of papers found here. Tied up with this issue of citation is storage of materials. These papers occupy a liminal space between an official publication and a paper privately distributed (as, say, at a paper conference). Should there be long-term storage of past article versions, as there is with computer software? Or should papers be taken down after official publication, and a redirt to the article occur in its place? Should these decisions be left to authors themselves, or ought we aim for some sort of uniformity here? For an interesting article on the benefits and pitfalls of pre-publication on the internet, see "Towards Open Access in Ancient Studies: The Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics" by Josiah Ober et al.