Submission
Publisher copyright policies | Requests to publishers | Pre-prints & Post-Prints
Publisher Copyright Policies
The majority of publishers support the right of academic authors to mount their own work online: however, some prohibit authors from using their work in this way as a condition of their copyright transfer agreement which they ask the author to sign.
SHERPA maintains the SHERPA/RoMEO listing, which details the rights given to authors by the major publishers of academic journals. Search for publishers to find what permissions are normally given as part of each publisher's copyright transfer agreement.
Requests to publishers
Where there is no explicit permission given to mount a full-text version on a repository as part of a copyright agreement, it is often worthwhile writing or emailing directly to the publisher. This can be true even where permission has been explicitly denied, but obviously in such cases, it is even more important to get permission in writing. A request template can be used to form a letter to a publisher asking for permission to mount material on a repository on behalf of an academic author. Some publishers insist on the author writing or emailing them directly to request permission to mount eprints in a repository. In such cases, it may be useful to provide the author with an alternate template to help them construct their request.
Write to the editor or officer in charge of authors' rights if possible, rather than to a general publisher's email for permissions for re-use of published material. It is important that the request can be seen to come from the author and is part of the publisher/author relationship, rather than from an unconnected party elsewhere that wishes to re-use published material for their own purposes. Use the SHERPA/RoMEO listing to easily find publishers' home pages.
Pre-print and Post-print
The terms pre-print and post-print are often used to describe successive stages in the development of an artilce. Unfortunately, the terms are used to mean different things by different people and this can cause some confusion and ambiguity.
One usage of the term pre-print is to describe the first draft of the article - before peer-review, even before any contact with a publisher. This use is common amongst academics, for whom the key modification of an article is the peer-review process.
Another use of the term pre-print is for the finished article, reviewed and amended, ready and accepted for publication - but separate from the version that is type-set or formatted by the publisher. This use is more common amongst publishers, for whom the final and significant stage of modification to an article is the arrangement of the material for putting to print.
Such diverse meanings can be confusing and can change the understanding of a copyright transfer agreement. To try to clarify the situation, the SHERPA/RoMEO listing - and other documents on the SHERPA site - characterises pre-prints as being the version of the paper before peer review and post-prints as being the version of the paper after peer-review, with revisions having been made. This means that in terms of content, post-prints are the article as published. However, in terms of appearance this might not be the same as the published article, as publishers often reserve for themselves rights in their own arrangement of type-setting and formatting.
Some publishers insist that authors use the publisher-generated .pdf - often because the publishers want their material to be seen as a professionally produced .pdf that fits with their own house-style. However, such a formatted file is the copyright of the publisher and cannot be used without explicit permission. Typically, this means that the author cannot use the publisher-generated .pdf file, but must make their own .pdf version for submission to a repository.