Self-archiving

To self-archive is to deposit a free copy of a digital document on the World Wide Web in order to provide open access to it.[1] The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer-reviewed research journal and conference articles as well as theses, deposited in the author's own institutional repository or open archive for the purpose of maximizing its accessibility, usage and citation impact.

Self-archiving is one of two general methods for providing open access. It is sometimes called the "green" road to open access, while the other method - publishing in an open access journal - is also referred to as the "golden" road.[2]

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[3]) although computer scientists had been doing self-archiving spontaneously 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).

About 64% of the 999 publishers (and over 90% of the journals) currently registered in the SHERPA RoMEO publisher policy index endorse self-archiving by authors of the preprint and/or postprint versions of their papers. [4] Whereas the right to self-archive postprints is a copyright matter, the right to self-archive preprints is merely a question of journal policy.[5]

See also

References

  1. ^ Harnad, S. (2001). "The Self-Archiving Initiative". Nature 410 (6832): 1024–1025. doi:10.1038/35074210. 
  2. ^ 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.
  3. ^ 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/
  4. ^ SHERPA RoMEO. (2010). [Chart illustration for 999 publishers by archiving policy]. Statistics on publishers' copyright policies & self-archiving. Retrieved from http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/statistics.php
  5. ^ Self-Archiving FAQ

External links