So
you?ve completed your study and published your paper in the journal of
your choice. Now you want to make your paper accessible to more and more
readers within and outside the scientific community so as to increase
its impact. One way to increase the visibility of your paper is through
self-archiving. 

What is self-archiving?
Self-archiving
is the practice of placing digital versions of scientific literature
online. When you self-archive your research, you make it freely
available to anyone on the Internet. In other words, self-archiving
makes your research widely ?visible, accessible, harvestable,
searchable, and useable,?¹ thus increasing its reach and impact, and possibly the number of citations it receives.

Where does self-archiving fit in the publishing process?
As
the figure below shows, you can self-archive different versions of your
research paper: (a) the version before peer review, called the
?pre-print,? and (b) the version that has been peer reviewed and
accepted for publication, called the ?refereed post-print.? All versions
of papers made available online are referred to as ?e-prints.?

Figure: Stages when manuscripts may be self-archived (adapted⁵)

Where can you self-archive? 

Research articles can be self-archived in repositories, which are electronic archives, or on personal servers.⁶

Institutional repositories: Many
universities and research institutions own repositories where all their
members can deposit their research papers. This enables researchers
from that institution to view each other?s work and gives anyone
interested a broad view of all work being conducted through that
institution.

Subject-based repositories: Some archives are subject-area specific and tend to be very popular in their respective disciplines, for example, PubMed for biomedical studies; RePEc for economics; and arXiv most popularly for physics, mathematics, and computer science.

Personal servers or profile pages: Researchers can upload their work onto their own web pages. Further, some social networking sites for researchers, like ResearchGate , have sections dedicated to uploaded publications. 

Copyright issues related to self-archiving

• Self-archiving
  the pre-print version of your article does not infringe any copyright
  agreement since it is done prior to submission to the publisher. Hence,
  it is not a legal matter. Sometimes, though increasingly rarely,
  journals might disallow self-archiving pre-prints, which is a matter of
  journal policy and not copyright. There tend to be some discipline-based
  differences here, with self-archiving being a common and accepted
  practice in the physical sciences (physics, computer science, etc.), but
  not so much so in the biomedical sciences.
• On
  the other hand, the copyrights of refereed post-prints usually belong
  to the journal, and self-archiving these can lead to a legal breach if
  the journal?s policy is not followed. Journals/publishers have different
  copyright policies with regard to self-archiving post-prints. The table
  below shows the differing policies of some popular publishers with
  respect to self-archiving.⁷ Most publishers allow self-archiving of some sort, but remember to check your journal/publishers policy before self-archiving.

Why is self-archiving not widely done? 

If
self-archiving carries such benefits, why is it not widely prevalent?
Here are some of the reasons for this and counter arguments in support
of self-archiving⁸:

1. Lack of awareness of its benefits: A
   large proportion of authors are unaware of the option of self-archiving
   and its benefits. Therefore, even if the authors? institutions have
   repositories, authors themselves don?t bother with self-archiving unless
   their institutions mandate it.
    
2. Concern about the quality of self-archived articles: In
   some fields of study, such as computer science, pre-prints are archived
   much more than post-prints. Self-archiving pre-prints allows for
   research to be scrutinized by the larger scientific community before it
   goes through peer review. Further, in all archiving repositories,
   pre-prints are clearly marked as such. As for post-prints, their quality
   need not be questioned because they are merely a copy of the journal?s
   peer-reviewed published version.
    
3. Fear of infringing the journal?s copyright policies: Most
   journals, in their instructions for authors, clearly state their
   copyright policies with regard to self-archiving. As long as you read
   and understand these policies, most of which allow authors to
   self-archive, you do not risk infringing any agreements.
    
4. Perception that self-archiving is time consuming and cumbersome: Contrary to this belief, self-archiving takes only about 10 minutes⁹ for the first paper when you have to create a profile/account, and only a small percentage of people find it ?very difficult.?⁸ For all subsequent papers, the process is even easier and faster.
    
5. Fear of disrupting the current scholarly publishing model: Institutions
   may refrain from creating repositories for fear that such archives may
   be seen as a substitute for journals. However, in a previous study⁸,
   two major publishers in physics?the American Physical Society (APS) and
   the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd. (IOPP)?confirmed that the
   physics pre-print server axXiv did not in any way threaten their own
   business models. Thus, publishers and self-archiving servers may well be
   able to coexist peacefully.

The role of self-archiving in open access 

Self-archiving
constitutes what is called the ?green route? to open access. This means
that authors can make their research papers available and readers can
access them?both free of cost. This is different from publishing in an
open access journal, such as Public Library of Science (PLOS)
publications, where authors pay the journal a publication fee, after
which the published study is made available to the public for free?a
model known as the ?gold route? to open access. It is important to note
that self-archiving ?is not an alternative to publishing in learned
journals, but an adjunct, a complementary activity where an author
publishes his or her article in whatever journal s/he chooses and simply
self-archives a copy.?⁵

Future of article access 

Papers
published in subscription journals are usually accessible only to
researchers whose institutional libraries have subscriptions to those
journals. Researchers affiliated to smaller institutions that cannot
afford extensive journal subscriptions would not be able to access these
papers. Moreover, the chances of such research reaching a wider
audience of lay people and experts in unrelated fields are slim. Today,
the world is 

increasingly
moving toward a system where the intellectual output of the research
community can be freely disseminated to the world at large. New journals
adopting the gold route of open access, that is, with an
article-processing charge for authors, are emerging, and even
traditional publishers that work with a subscription fee-based model are
offering more open access options. Funding bodies are encouraging
scientists to embrace the concept of allowing free access to published
literature. For example, Research Councils UK (RCUK) has recently
announced a policy stating that from April 2013, all science papers that
have received funding from grant agencies affiliated to RCUK must be
made freely available within six months of publication.¹⁰ Public
institutions like the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) mandate
that all articles arising from NIH funds be archived in PubMed upon
acceptance for publication. For a substantial number of journals, the
NIH public access policy requires that the final published version of
all NIH-funded research articles be made available on PubMed Central not
later than 12 months after publication.¹¹ Newer models of open access are also being explored. 

Conclusion 

In
sum, self-archiving is free, easy, and immensely beneficial. Moreover,
it is in line with the noble evolving trend of free widespread
dissemination of research findings for rapid global advancement of
science. So go ahead and consider self-archiving a viable option to
contribute to the progress of science and to increase your own research
impact by making your work more accessible.

Bibliography

• Self-Archiving FAQ, EPrints. http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/
• Lawrence S (2001). Free online availability substantially increases a paper?s impact. Nature 411: 521.
• Pinfield
  S. Self-archiving publications. In: Gorman GE and Rowland F (ed.s).
  International Yearbook of Library and Information Management 2004-2005:
  Scholarly publishing in an electronic era. London: Facet, 2004, pp
  118-145.
• SPARC Europe. Institutional repositories. http://sparceurope.org/repositories/
• Brody T, Hajjem C, and Harnad S. http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Temp/soton-policy.pdf
• http://www.self-archiving.me/ Self Archiving: The Green Route to Open Access, powered by ResearchGATE. 
• Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving. http://www-library.desy.de/oa/sherpa.hep.html
• Swan A and Brown S (2005). Open access self-archiving: An author study. [Departmental Technical Report] http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/Open%20Access%20Self%20Archiving-an%20author%20study.pdf
• Carr
  L and Harnad S (2005). Keystroke economy: A study of the time and
  effort involved in self-archiving. Technical Report , ECS, University of
  Southampton. [Technical Report] http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/Open%20Access%20Self%20Archiving-an%20author%20study.pdf
• UK research funders announce liberated open-access policy. Nature News Blog, Jul 16, 2012. http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/07/uk-research-funders-announce-liberated-open-access-policy.html
• NIH Public Access Policy Details. http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm