Self-Archiving

Description

From the Wikipedia [1]:

"Self-archiving involves depositing a free copy of a digital document on the World Wide Web in order to provide open access to it. The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer reviewed research journal and conference articles as well as theses, deposited in the author's own institutional repository or open archive for the purpose of maximizing its accessibility, usage and citation impact.

Self-archiving is one of two general methods for providing open access. The other is open access publishing in an open access journal. The former is sometimes called the "green" and the latter the "golden" road to open access.

Self-archiving was first explicitly proposed as a universal practice by Stevan Harnad in his 1994 posting "Subversive Proposal", although computer scientists had been doing it spontaneously in anonymous FTP archives since at least the 1980s (see CiteSeer) and physicists since the early 1990s on the web (see arXiv).

About 91% of peer-reviewed journals surveyed by eprints already endorse authors self-archiving preprint and/or postprint versions of their papers [1]. Whereas the right to self-archive postprints is a copyright matter, the right to self-archive preprints is merely a question of journal policy." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-archiving)

Examples

"The oldest OA archive is arXiv, a physics archive. Some other major repositories are: HighWire Press, PubMed Central, E-LIS, D-LIST

Anyone interested in self-archiving should check out the RoMEO tool. You can perform a search for a journal to find out if you can self-archive." (http://jandawson.wordpress.com/2008/03/12/two-roads-to-open-access-science-information/)