Check what you’re allowed to do with your manuscript

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There is a lot to keep track of when it comes to open access publishing. To help you find your way we’re publishing five blog posts with quick tips for researchers. These will hopefully make the process of publishing your paper with open access a bit easier.

In our first blog post we wrote about how important it is to save your accepted manuscript. You often have more rights to it than to the publisher’s PDF.

Figure courtesy of the Office of Scholarly Communications, University of Cambridge used under CC BY 4.0.

To see what you are allowed to do with your accepted manuscript there are several different resources. The library is happy to help if you have any questions, but here we list a few tools that you can use to check for yourself.

SHERPA/ROMEO is a database that gathers many publisher copyright policies and information about self-archiving. By searching for a journal name or ISSN you can find out exactly what you can do with which version of the manuscript, and what embargo period might apply. 

Här söker vi efter tidskriften Nursing in Critical Care:

This yields the following information in SHERPA/ROMEO:

  1. The author’s pre-print can be published immediately. This is the version of the manuscript that has not yet been through peer review.
  2. The author’s accepted manuscript (post -print) can also be published, but with some restrictions.
  3. The author’s accepted manuscript can be published after a 12-month embargo.
  4. The publisher’s PDF cannot be used. (This information can be found in two places – that’s how important it is.)
  5. The author’s accepted manuscript can be published on a personal webpage, or an institutional repository. The latter is exactly what DiVA is.
  6. When you publish the author’s manuscript after 12 months you have to refer to the journal’s final version of the article, as that is the version of record. (In other words – the version that should be cited.) DiVA automatically creates a cover page with this kind of information in the part of the publication process that the library takes care of. 
  7. When you publish the author’s accepted manuscript this has to be preceded by a set statement. This statement is part of the cover page that DiVA adds.