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About Green Open Access

"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. 

Digital Commons

The Digital Commons is DePaul's institutional repository. It provides a permanent, safe service for providing access to articles, technical reports, datasets, images and other file types produced at DePaul by faculty, students and staff. The repository enables DePaul researchers and academic units to make their scholarly materials accessible to the world, at a stable URL, with the assurance that the materials will be maintained into the future.

Disciplinary Repositories

Disciplinary repositories, sometimes called subject repositories, perform the same sorts of services as institutional repositories, but for scholars within particular disciplines or groups of disciplines. This is one way that scholars can help identify potential collaborators.

To find a disciplinary repository to share your work, visit the Disciplinary Repositories Wiki for a comprehensive list organized by subject. Examples include:

Which Version Can I Share?

You can use the copyright & self-archiving tool SHERPA/RoMEO to check your ability to deposit the pre-print, post-print, or final version of your article in an open repository. Archiving your research can make your work freely accessible, stops your research from being taken down, and gets you a wider audience to increase your research impact.

It can be a bit tricky to know your rights and choose the right version of your work to share. 

Pre-Print

Also known as: Author's manuscript, original manuscript, first draft. 

Definition: Draft of the manuscript before formal peer-review, or the first version sent to the journal for consideration.

Looks like: An essay with no journal branding. It is commonly a .DOCX or other text format.

Post-Print

Also known as: AAM, accepted manuscript author accepted manuscript, accepted author manuscript. 

Definition: Final version of the manuscript after formal peer-review but before being type-set by the publisher. It contains all revisions made during the peer-review process.

Looks like: An essay with no journal branding, usually double-spaced, might have corrections on the sides. It is commonly a .DOCX or other text format.

Final Version

Also known as: Published version, version of record. 

Definition: Version of the manuscript published in a journal with the journal's type-set and branding.

Looks like: Has the journal branding and logo. It is commonly a PDF downloaded from the journal's website.

Benefits of Green OA

  • Greater visibility and research impact
  • Research shared more quickly
  • You can publish in traditional journals of your choosing
  • Meets funder public access requirements
  • No cost to the researcher or research funder

Author's Rights

When your journal article is accepted by a publisher, you will be asked to sign a publication agreement which will transfer some or all of the copyright in your work to the publisher. Read what rights you are transferring, and consider negotiating to retain some rights to your work if you would like to use or post the article:

  • in course sites
  • in a course-pack
  • in scholarly presentations
  • on your personal web page
  • and in scholarly repositories 

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) offers an online addendum form for authors to adapt and fill out to request certain permissions, such as the ability to self-archive a copy of their work on their personal websites and in their institution's repository, to send to journal/publishers before signing the author publication and copyright agreement