Open Access
Scholarly Communication Librarian
300 E. Orange Mall
Tempe, AZ 85287-1006
Open Access through Repositories
The most consistent method of making your work open access is posting it to a repository. This is often called "Green" open access. Green open access has many benefits, including allowing you more control over what types of work you share, where it is located and how it is organized, and how it may be used by others. Open access through a repository is also the only option that is always completely free, since the majority of open access repository platforms are managed by institutions, funding agencies, or non-profit organizations which support open science.
The most challenging aspect of green open access is navigating the copyright issues that are involved with published work and the rights authors may transfer to publishers as part of their publication agreement. While most publishers do allow authors to share their work in a repository, there are usually requirements related to which version of the article is permitted (such as the submitted version or the accepted version) and there may be an embargo period of 12-24 months before the open access version can be publicly available. This requires authors to pay more attention to the content of their publishing agreements, or review the publisher's self-archiving policies.
If you are interested in developing a strategy for making your work open access through a repository, here are some tips on understanding your rights as an author, and some suggestions on finding an appropriate repository for your work.
Understanding your rights as an author
If you want to publicly post your work (whether in a repository, your website, or even sites like Academia.edu or Research Gate), you must retain the appropriate copyright permissions. Traditional journals often require authors to transfer most or all of their copyrights as part of the publication agreement. However, many publishers do have established policies that allow authors to archive their work as a part of their standard publishing agreement. SHERPA/RoMEO is an excellent resource to help you determine a publisher's standard policy for self-archiving.
If you retain the rights to share your work, you can also choose what permissions to give others when using your work by assigning a license, such as a Creative Commons license. Licenses can make your work more discoverable to unanticipated readers, and encourage innovative uses - such as teaching, text and data mining, and meta-analysis. We provide some guidance on choosing a license below.
If you are interested in more information regarding your rights as an author rights and strategies for negotiating with publishers, visit the Copyright for Authors guide.
- Pre-prints, post-prints, and publisher's PDF explainedAn explanation of the various versions of your article, how to find them, and when you can share them.
- Direct2AAM: Helping Authors Find Author Accepted ManuscriptsA set of guides that provide easy to follow instructions for authors to obtain an Author Accepted Manuscript from their journal submission system, where the AAM is stored during the publishing process.
- Ten simple rules to consider regarding preprint submissionAs a result of an ASAPbio meeting held in February of 2016, a paper was published that describes the pros and cons of preprints from the perspective of the stakeholders—scientists, publishers, and funders. Here, we formulate the message specifically for scientists in the form of ten simple rules for considering using preprints as a communication mechanism.
Repositories
General Repositories and Resources
This list includes indexes of repositories, as well as useful information regarding policies from publishers, funders and institutions that enable posting your work in a repository.
- SHERPA/RoMEOList of journal publishers' archiving policies.
- SHERPA/JULIETInternational list of funding agencies' open access publishing, archiving, and data archiving policies
- The Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies (ROARMAP)A searchable international registry charting the growth of open access mandates and policies adopted by universities, research institutions, and research funders that require or request their researchers to provide open access to their peer-reviewed research article output by depositing it in an open access repository.
- The Directory of Open Access Repositories - OpenDOARA directory of academic open access repositories, note, however, that disciplinary repositories on the OSF Preprints platform are not currently indexed here. (2020-01-02)
- OSF PreprintsA platform hosting a number of disciplinary repositories, including Agrixiv, Earth Arxiv, LIS Scholarship Archive, PsyArXiv, SocArXiv, and Thesis Commons. Note: These are not indexed in OpenDOAR.
- Registry of Research Data Repositories (Re3data)The largest and most comprehensive registry of research data repositories available.
- ZenodoAn open access repository hosted by CERN and dedicated to advancing open science. Any researcher in any discipline can register and add their research, code and data.
Institutional Repositories
Institutional repositories are digital collections managed by a university or research organization. ASU Library's KEEP Institutional Repository supports open access, allowing for the discovery of the creative and scholarly output of the ASU community.
- ASU Library's KEEP RepositoryKEEP is the home for scholarship produced by ASU faculty, staff, and students. Find and submit open access articles, collaborative research projects, musical performances, theses and dissertations and more!
- ASU Research Data RepositoryASU's institutional research data publishing platform is compliant only for de-identified data. Available to ASU affiliated researchers to submit openly accessible research data.
- Open Science Framework (OSF)A scholarly, collaborative project management and data storage tool, integrates with tools such as Dropbox, GitHub, FigShare, Box, Mendeley, and Amazon Web Services. You can create an account using your ASURITE.
- CERN Document ServerAccess articles, reports and multimedia content in high energy physics produced at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
- The World BankThe World Bank is the largest single source of development knowledge. The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) is The World Bank’s official open access repository for its research outputs and knowledge products.
Disciplinary Repositories
Discipline or subject repositories are online archives designed to preserve, organize, and disseminate research either centered on a single discipline (e.g biology or physics) or multi-disciplinary (e.g. life sciences or humanities). Material is deposited by researchers throughout the world to be freely accessible with limited restrictions.
- The Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR)An ASU supported online archive for archaeological information.
- PubMed CentralPubMed Central (PMC) is a free archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)PubMed Central (PMC) is a full-text, online archive of journal literature operated by the National Library of Medicine. NASA is using PMC to permanently preserve and provide easy public access to the peer-reviewed papers resulting from NASA-funded research.
- arXiv.orgarXiv is an open access, e-print service in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics.
- AgEconAgEcon Search is a free, open access repository of full-text scholarly literature in agricultural and applied economics, including: working papers, conference papers, and journal articles.
- bioRxivbioRxiv (pronounced "bio-archive") is a free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences.
- CORE - Humanities CommonsPart of the Modern Language Association's Humanities Commons, CORE accepts your articles, monographs, course materials, white papers, conference papers, code, and digital projects.
- LIS Scholarship ArchiveIncludes content from the library and information science (LIS) community and allied fields, including but not limited to: Articles, Reports, Metadata, Manuscripts, Pre-/post-prints, Data, Code, Student work, Posters Book Chapters.
- MindRxivRepository for research on mind and contemplative practices - includes anthropology, medicine and health services, philosophy, religion, education, etc.
- MLA CommonsThe MLA Commons network links members of the Modern Language Association and provides new avenues for scholarly communication and collaboration. This growing platform allows MLA members to create a professional profile, connect with one another, seek feedback on their work, establish and join groups to discuss common interests, and share their ideas with a broader audience through new kinds of open-access publications.
- PaleorXivA preprint archive for Paleontology , PaleorXiv accepts all types of manuscript, including but not limited to systematic reviews, hypotheses, ‘negative’ results, and data and methods papers.
- PhilArchivePhilArchive is the largest open access e-print archive in philosophy. Formerly known as the PhilPapers Archive, it is built on and integrated with the PhilPapers database.
- PsyArXivRepository for the psychological sciences, maintained by The Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science.
- SocArXivOpen Archive of the Social Sciences, provides a free, non-profit, open access platform for social scientists to upload working papers, preprints, and published papers, with the option to link data and code.
Choosing a License
- Creative Commons License ChooserQuick guide for choosing the best Creative Commons (CC) license for your work.
- Choose an open source licenseA tool to help you choose from a variety of open licenses. Specifically designed for code.
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