Research Guides: Getting Your Paper Noticed: Sharing Your Paper

Sharing Your Paper

While it is preferable to publish in journals that are open and accessible, that may not always be possible. However, most times you can make a copy of your work free to access by depositing a copy in a repository. Open access content in repositories often includes peer-reviewed content (publisher's version or post-prints) as well as pre-prints, the version of an article before it underwent peer review.

Pre-print (or preprint)
- The version of a paper submitted to a journal before it underwent peer review.
- Also called the "submitted manuscript" or "submitted version"
Post-print (or postprint)
- The final version, post peer review, without the publisher’s formatting.
- Also called the "accepted manuscript" or "final accepted version"
Final version
- The version as it appears in the journal with the publisher's typesetting, copy-edits, comments, supplemental data, hyperlinks, and other standardized changes.
- Also called the "version of record,” the "publisher's version," or the "PDF version"
Embargo
- Also called "Delayed Open Access"
- Some subscription journals have chosen to make all of their content open access after an embargo, a set amount of time post-publication, has passed. This time period is usually between 1 to 2 years but can be as short as 2 months and as long as 10 years.

There are thousands of journals, but some journals and publishers are more open than others; some are hybrid offering select articles as open, while others are less open. Here is a diagram from SPARC that details the range of options you might have available to you depending on where you published.

To help you understand what you can share and where you can share it, SHERPA/roMEO is a useful database. This database hosts a journal's or a publisher's default policy on self-archiving.

Additionally, the SPARC Author Addendum is a contract that you may be able to use in negotiating your rights as an author.

Below are common places where you may want to post or share your paper. Be sure to review your rights and restrictions before posting and sharing.

Humanities Commons
Run by the MLA, Humanities Commons is a scholarly networking site and repository for papers, book chapters, and teaching materials in a wide variety of disciplines in the humanities.
OSF Preprints
Is multidisciplinary, aggregates over 30 preprint servers, contains over 2 million papers, and is run by the Centre for Open Science.
Preprints.org
Supported by MDPI, Preprints is a platform dedicated to making early versions of research outputs permanently available and citable. Papers can be updated by authors at any time. Content includes a wide range of Engineering, Life Sciences, Materials Sciences, and Arts & Humanities papers. Some subject areas are more populous than others.
Scholarly Commons
The Student Works collection encompasses student research and creative output from all four of ERAU's campuses: Daytona Beach, Prescott, Worldwide, and Asia/Singapore. Research includes journal articles, conference presentations, poster sessions, infographics, and other forms of student scholarship. All documents have been reviewed and recommended by faculty mentors and advisors.
SocArXiv
An open archive for the social sciences, SocArXiv specializes in Sociology, Education, and Law. However, there are also a variety of Arts & Humanities papers archived on the platform.

Getting Your Paper Noticed

Sharing Your Paper

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