"Green" open access refers to when an article is published in a traditional journal, but then a version of the article is made available in a publicly-available repository. Commonly, these are referred to as "preprints" or "author accepted manuscripts" - denoting they are a complete version of the manuscript, but have not necessarily undergone peer review or a formal editing process. The process of uploading your work to a repository is often called "self-archiving" your work. Some repositories also accept the final, peer-reviewed version of articles, such as PubMed Central. (Note: Authors who elect to publish OA with ACS journals will automatically have their final published article sent for deposit in PubMed Central.)
Publishers and journals differ in their policies regarding how and when authors can self-archive their work in repositories. Sherpa Romeo is a useful tool that can tell you if the journal your work has been accepted to allows self-archiving. See the box below for more information.
Your ability to self-archive your work will depend on the publishing agreement you have signed with the journal publishing your work. If you retain the copyright to your work, or publish your work under a Creative Commons license, you can upload your work to a repository. If you have signed away your author rights, many publishers still allow you to self-archive your work, sometimes after an embargo period of 6 months to a year.
To learn more about whether or not you can archive your work, see the Sherpa Romeo tool below and check the author guidelines of the journals where you have published. See more information below about archiving your work in our OA Institutional Repository, Scholar Commons.
Scholar Commons is an Open Access Institutional Repository to preserve, collect and disseminate the research and scholarship of the University of South Carolina including USCA. With scholarly content contributed by faculty, researchers and students, the repository expands the visibility, access and influence of the University. It also supports efforts to increase collaboration and cross discipline research within and outside the university as well as supporting Open Access efforts to increase access to the exchange of scholarship globally. If you would like to include your work in the Scholar Commons, please contact Natalia Taylor Bowdoin, Library Collections Coordinator, at nataliab@usca.edu or Amanda Nunnelly-Stewart, Electronic Resources Librarian at amanda.stewart@usca.edu.
Some of the benefits of inclusion in Scholar Commons include:
1. We will research copyright status on your published material to ensure that it can be included in Scholar Commons. We will also upload metadata and copies of all materials for which this use is permitted, thereby making them freely available online to a larger worldwide audience. At this time we are including peer-reviewed journal articles. We will also include book chapters, books or conference proceedings if you already have a digital or scanned copy available.
2. Items uploaded are optimized for fast, accurate indexing by Google, Google Scholar, Yahoo and Bing.
3. Your readership will increase because researchers in related fields around the world will be able to access your work without the "toll" required on traditional publishing platforms. This could also lead to cross-discipline and cross-institution collaboration.
4. Your readership will circulate beyond the academic community to professionals in the field and society in general.
5. All your open access scholarship can be presented in one place.
6. Each entry will have a permanent address that can be used in other publications.
7. Scholar Commons will allow you to increase your presence on the Web.
8. You will receive monthly statistics on downloads of your articles.
If you are currently publishing a journal, consider the Scholar Commons for your open access publishing platform. USC Aiken currently has three open access journals hosted on the Scholar Commons site:
There are a wide variety of subject and institutional repositories that can be used to archive you work. Subject repositories accept work from authors from any institution, so long as the work is in-scope of the repository's disciplinary focus. Institutional repositories collect all the work published by authors from a specific academic institution. It is recommended that authors archive their work in both types of repositories when possible.
Below is a list of health sciences subject repositories that may accept your work.
