Self-archiving
Self-archiving is the act of (the author's) depositing a free copy of an electronic document online in order to provide open access to it.<ref>Harnad, S. (2001). "The Self-Archiving Initiative". Nature. 410 (6832): 1024–1025. doi:10.1038/35074210. PMID 11323640. S2CID 4390371.</ref> The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer-reviewed research journal and conference articles, as well as theses and book chapters, deposited in the author's own institutional repository or open archive for the purpose of maximizing its accessibility, usage and citation impact. The term green open access has become common in recent years, distinguishing this approach from gold open access, where the journal itself makes the articles publicly available without charge to the reader.<ref name="Harnad et al Golden Road">Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access. Serials Review 30.</ref>
Origins
Self-archiving was first explicitly proposed as a universal practice by Stevan Harnad in his 1994 online posting "Subversive Proposal" (later published in Association of Research Libraries<ref name="Harnad Subversive Proposal">Okerson, A. S. & O'Donnell, J. J. eds. (1995). Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Association of Research Libraries. Retrieved from http://www.arl.org/sc/subversive/</ref>) although computer scientists had been practicing self-archiving in anonymous FTP archives since at least the 1980s (see CiteSeer) and physicists had been doing it since the early 1990s on the web (see arXiv).
The concept of green open access was coined in 2004 to describe a "mode of publishing in non open access journal but also self archiving it in an open access archive".<ref>Harnad, Stevan (2005). "Fast-Forward on the Green Road to Open Access: The Case Against Mixing Up Green and Gold". Ariadne (42). arXiv:cs/0503021. Bibcode:2005cs........3021H. ISSN 1361-3200.</ref> Different drafts of a paper may be self-archived, such as the internal non-peer-reviewed version, or the peer-reviewed version published in a journal. Green open access through self-archiving was initially enabled through institutional or disciplinary repositories, as a growing number of universities adopted policies to encourage self-archiving. Self-archiving repositories do not peer-review articles, though they may hold copies of otherwise peer-reviewed articles. Self-archiving repositories also expect that the author who self-archives has the necessary rights to do so, as copyright may have been transferred to a publisher. Therefore it may only be possible to self-archive the preprint of the article.<ref>Madalli, Devika P. (2015). Concepts of openness and open access. UNESCO Publishing. pp. 17–18. ISBN 9789231000799.</ref>
Implementation
Whereas the right to self-archive postprints is often a copyright matter (if the rights have been transferred to the publisher), the right to self-archive preprints is merely a question of journal policy.<ref>Self-Archiving FAQ</ref><ref>"THES May 12 1995: PostGutenberg Galaxy". cogprints.org. Retrieved 2017-10-27.</ref>
A 2003 study by Elizabeth Gadd, Charles Oppenheim, and Steve Probets of the Department of Information Science at Loughborough University analysed 80 journal publishers' copyright agreements and found that 90 percent of publishers asked for some form of copyright transfer and only 42.5 percent allowed self-archiving in some form.<ref>Gadd, Elizabeth; Oppenheim, Charles; Probets, Steve (2003). "RoMEO studies 4: an analysis of journal publishers' copyright agreements". Learned Publishing. 16 (4): 293–308. doi:10.1087/095315103322422053. hdl:10150/105141. ISSN 1741-4857. S2CID 40861778.</ref> In 2014 the SHERPA/Romeo project recorded that of 1,275 publishers 70 percent allowed for some form of self-archiving, with 62 percent allowing both pre and postprint self-archiving of published papers.<ref>Scheufen, Marc (2014). Copyright Versus Open Access: On the Organisation and International Political Economy of Access to Scientific Knowledge. Springer. p. 85. ISBN 978-3-319-12738-5.</ref> In 2017 the project recorded that of 2,375 publishers 41 percent allowed pre and postprint to be self-archived. 33 percent only allowed the self-archiving of the postprint, meaning the final draft post-refereeing. 6 percent of publishers only allowed self-archiving of the preprint, meaning the pre-refereeing draft.<ref>"RoMEO Statistics". SHERPA & JISC. Retrieved 2017-05-08.</ref>
Publishers such as Cambridge University Press<ref>Cambridge University Press. "Cambridge Journals Online: Open Access Options".</ref> or the American Geophysical Union,<ref>American Geophysical Union. "Usage Permissions".</ref> endorse self-archiving of the final published version of the article, not just peer-reviewed final drafts.
Locations for self-archiving include institutional repositories, subject-based repositories, personal websites, and social networking websites that target researchers.<ref name=":0">"A social networking site is not an open access repository". Office of Scholarly Communication. 2015-12-01. Retrieved 2017-02-24.</ref> Some publishers attempt to impose embargoes on self-archiving; embargo-lengths can be from 6–12 months or longer after the date of publication (see SHERPA/RoMEO). For embargoed deposits some institutional repositories have a request-a-copy Button with which users can request and authors can provide a single copy with one click each during the embargo.<ref>Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) "Open Access Mandates and the 'Fair Dealing' Button". In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)</ref>
Social reference management software websites such as Mendeley, Academia.edu, and ResearchGate facilitate sharing between researchers; however, these services are often subject to criticism for using scholars' contributions for commercial purposes<ref>"Do academic social networks share academics' interests?". Times Higher Education (THE). 2016-04-07. Retrieved 2017-02-24.</ref> as well as for copyright violation.<ref>Jamali, Hamid R. (2017-02-16). "Copyright compliance and infringement in ResearchGate full-text journal articles". Scientometrics. 112: 241–254. doi:10.1007/s11192-017-2291-4. ISSN 0138-9130. S2CID 27138477.</ref> They are also targeted by publishers for copyright compliance, such as when Elsevier (which purchased Mendeley) issued Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices to Academia.edu for hosting scientific papers.<ref>Clarke, Michael (11 December 2013). "The End of an Era for Academia.edu and Other Academic Networks?". The Scholarly Kitchen. Retrieved 2016-03-24.</ref> Social networking services also do not fulfill the requirements of many self-archiving policies from grant funders, journals, and institutions.<ref name=":0" />
In 2013 Germany created a legal basis for green open access<ref>"Bundestag beschließt Open Access-Zweitveröffentlichungsrecht Grünes Licht für grünen Weg". BuchReport. 28 June 2013. Retrieved 2017-05-08.</ref> by amending a secondary publication right into German copyright which gives scientists and researchers the legal right to self-archive their publications on the Internet, even if they have agreed to transfer all exploitation rights to a publisher. The secondary publication right applies to results of mainly publicly funded research, 12 months after the first publication. The right cannot be waived, and the author’s version is self-archived.<ref>Miao, Fengchun; Mishra, Sanjaya; McGreal, Rory (2016). Open educational resources: policy, costs, transformation. UNESCO Publishing. p. 90. ISBN 978-9231001482.</ref>
See also
- Internet Archive
- Manuscript (publishing)
- Open access mandate
- Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)
- Subversive Proposal
- List of academic journals by preprint policy
