Last month, I mentioned that authors posting copies of their articles online need to recollect about 2 big questions in order to determine whether they are acting in accordance with a copyright transfer agreement or publishing contract:

  1. What version of your commodity do you lot want to post online?
  2. Where practice you want to mail it?

(Of course, if yous publish in a gold open access journal that allows you to continue the copyright to your own piece of work, you don't need to worry most whatsoever of this).

In this post, I'll talk about the various locations online where you may desire to post your piece of work (sometimes called 'cocky-archiving), since scholarly publishers will oft grant authors the correct to post a copy of an article (at to the lowest degree a pre-print or a post-impress) in at least one of these locations:

Your personal website: This is probably the most common location where you lot would exist permitted to mail a copy of your article. At many universities, kinesthesia and staff are provided with server space to set upwardly their ain webpage. This often requires knowledge of technologies like FTP, HTML and CSS. While more universities are providing spider web design solutions such every bit Google Sites or Wordpress to their employees, maintaining a professional website can be time consuming and challenging. While personal websites are discoverable via Google, they are likely to take low traffic, and might not rise to the pinnacle of results lists. Researchers searching PubMed, Google Scholar, Web of Science or Scopus would have difficulty determining if a freely available re-create was on your website.

Institutional repositories: Many institutions desire to promote the work of their researchers. The institutional repository is a software solution that helps institutions post a collection documents and files online. Appropriate metadata can be added for each document and researcher and an author'due south documents can be easily grouped together. Institutional repositories are often discoverable in Google Scholar, and many of them play nicely with other databases. Only they also require intendance and feeding, then smaller institutions don't always take the resources or staff to maintain one, especially if kinesthesia aren't clamoring for it.

Bailiwick repositories: These are websites that maintain a database of manufactures published in other journals, pre-prints that haven't yet found their style into the peer reviewed literature, and/or datasets. They are maintained by a variety of organizations including scholarly societies, government agencies, libraries and not-profits. The most well-known subject repositories are PubMed Key (biomedical sciences) and arxiv.org (physics, math, biomath, etc.), although many disciplines have one. Use of these repositories varies from discipline to discipline, and some publishers are more than willing than others to allow eolith into subject repositories (where an article might exist more visible) or to accept papers that accept already been posted (as a pre-print) to a repository.

Academic social networking platforms: More and more researchers are creating profiles on academic social networks such as Academia.edu, ResearchGate, Mendeley and others. The registration procedure oft encourages researchers to upload copies of their articles, but this may often become against a copyright transfer agreement. If your agreement allows you to post a copy of the article somewhere, a non-profit site is often stipulated. The social networks mentioned here are all for-profit companies and (in a round-about way) competitors to traditional publishers.

If you are a researcher who wants to brand certain that folks take access to your piece of work, what can you do?

  1. Pay attention to your rights as authors - this isn't merely esoteric publishing jargon, this has a directly impact on your career.
  2. Publish in a aureate open up access periodical.
  3. If you lot can't publish in a gold open access periodical, try to select a periodical that allows you to post the post-impress or publisher's version of your article online. The Sherpa/Romeo database can assist you determine what your rights will exist.
  4. Talk to your friendly local librarian. We don't bite, I can (about) guarantee.
    • Inquire them if your establishment has an institutional repository.
    • Inquire them to assist you locate a subject repository for your piece of work.
  5. Once you've posted your work to an institutional repository, a subject repository or your personal website (as permitted in your copyright transfer agreement), provide a link to that document in your social networking profiles.