Publishing and Self-Archiving

Question

Recently I had a paper accepted by a major journal in discrete mathematics. Now the paper is going through the final stages of publication. The publisher sent me a link in which I have to specify the access policy for the paper. I can choose to either pay a fee (which I won't), and make my paper publicly available from the publisher website, or I can choose to self-archive, and then make my paper publicly available after a period of 24 months of embargo. More precisely, the text for the self-archiving is the following:

I wish to self-archive my accepted author manucript , which is my draft version of the article and which may include any author-incorporated changes from the peer review process. I can post this author manuscript on my institutional or subject-orientated repository immediately for internal use and make it publicly available after a journal specific embargo period has expired.

The problem is that I have already posted the revised version of my paper at arxiv much before receiving this access form from the publisher. So I have some questions concerning this paragraph.

1. The paragraph says that I can post the manuscript at a subject-oriented repository immediately for internal use. As mentioned before I already posted it to arxiv, which I think can be considered as a subject-oriented repository. Is that allowed? What do they mean by internal use?
2. What do they mean about making the manuscript publicly available after the embargo? I have a link at my homepage pointing to the arxiv page. Is this considered to be publicly available?
3. What is the difference between posting it to a repository and making it public?
4. Can I get in trouble if they find the link to the paper at my homepage?

Answer 1

The text you quote is from Elsevier, and their policy on hosting articles says that "arXiv and RePEc can update a preprint immediately with the accepted manuscript and a DOI link to the formal publication" (while the embargo period applies only to other organizations), so you haven't violated the agreement in updating the arXiv posting. You can add the DOI via the arXiv's journal reference feature once it is available.

Answer 2

I can post this author manuscript on my institutional or subject-orientated repository immediately for internal use […]

[…]

The paragraph says that I can post the manuscript at a subject-oriented repository immediately for internal use. As mentioned before I already posted it to arxiv, which I think can be considered as a subject-oriented repository. Is that allowed? What do they mean by internal use?

This respective sentence is not very well phrased and probably misphrased. “Subject-orientated repository” sounds very much like ArXiv but contradicts “internal use” (unless they have a very wide definition of internal). Having a “subject-orientated repository“ for “internal use” would have to be institutional and thus already be covered without adding “subject-orientated repository“.

To be sure you should check other information by the publisher, in particular the copyright agreement (or similar) you probably agreed to already. Sherpa/Romeo may also help. If all that fails, you need to (and should) ask the publisher to clarify this.

If needed to guess, I would say that that line originally read “I can post this author manuscript on my institutional immediately for internal use” and then somebody inserted “or subject-orientated repository”.

What do they mean about making the manuscript publicly available after the embargo? I have a link at my homepage pointing to the arxiv page. Is this considered to be publicly available?

The ArXiv is already publically available, linking it does not change this. Making publically available means exactly that, so, e.g., it would cover putting the manuscript directly on your homepage.

What is the difference between posting it to a repository and making it public?

A repository may be not public. For example, our group has its own private paper repository.

Can I get in trouble if they find the link to the paper at my homepage?

If they find out about your ArXiv publication only that way, perhaps. But given that the ArXiv is public and easily searchable, that’s very unlikely.

What you can get in trouble for is publishing the paper on ArXiv. However, if the journal is general open to ArXiv publishing (see the first point), it is unlikely that they only allow it after they published the paper themselves. Again, what you should do is to take a look into the copyright agreement and similar and what they say about prior publication on public repositories and ask them if the information is unclear.

Answer 3

As a general reference tool, there is an attempt to collect all the different policies centrally such that you may search by your paper's DOI and get the information you need about legally sharing it: https://shareyourpaper.org/

Typically (for me) it's been the final author versions that I'm allowed to share, which I then go on to share with ShareYourPaper and also post on my ResearchGate, etc.

As with the comment about about ArXiv, there is also growing acceptance and promotion of preprint servers by major journals, e.g. on recently submitting a paper to the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), the process concluded by encouraging me to head on over to https://chemrxiv.org/ and upload all my materials there, too.

Answer 4

As stated by others in the comment section, it may also depend on your funding agency. In Canada, for instance, NSERC requires the manuscript be freely available within 12 months of publication, using a repository and/or the journal itself (http://www.science.gc.ca/eic/site/063.nsf/eng/h_F6765465.html?OpenDocument).