Most articles in DORA can be made freely accessible to everyone without any additional costs, neither for you as the author, nor for the reader (Green Road to Open Access). This gets you a wider audience to increase your research impact and facilitates compliance with Open Access policies of research funders. However, it can be a bit tricky to choose the right version of your work to share. Here we outline the different versions of your article, each version corresponding to the different stages of the peer review and publication process.
The archived digital publication is a secondary publication, mostly the accepted version, in addition to the publication of the “version of record” in traditional, subscription-based journals. Most publishers allow this green road to OA. The majority of academic journals provide a summary of permissions. They are usually part of each publisher's copyright transfer agreement in SHERPA/RoMEO.
There are three distinct versions that authors should become familiar with when submitting their work to DORA:
The submitted version, also called ‘preprint’, is the author’s original manuscript that has been submitted to a journal for consideration for publication. If published in a peer-reviewed journal, the submitted version does not reflect any revisions made during the peer review process. It also does not reflect any layout or copy editing done by the publisher in preparation for publication.
The accepted version, also called ‘postprint’, is the author’s final manuscript, which has been accepted for publication by the editor. It contains all revisions made during the peer review process. As for the submitted version (see above), the publisher has not yet started any copy-editing or typesetting in preparation for publication of the manuscript. It is important to note that proofs and offprints sent to the author from the publisher are not accepted versions. As the content of the accepted version is largely identical to that of the published article, we highly encourage authors to submit their accepted versions to DORA. Most journals allow this version of your publication to be made Open Access in an institutional repository such as DORA.
Once the DORA team receives the accepted version of your publication for deposit to DORA:
You can submit accepted versions to DORA by sending the document (PDF or Word) to @email. Please include the full citation for the final published article in the body of the e-mail. You can submit your manuscript as soon as it has been accepted. If the publisher requests an embargo on the accepted version of the publication, it will only be available in the intranet of Eawag/Empa/PSI/WSL until the embargo period has expired.
There are no formal requirements concerning the format of accepted versions as long as the content of the document is identical to the content of the article accepted for publication by the journal. You might even enhance the accepted version by placing figures in desired positions within the text, removing double line spacing, or removing colours and comments that you have added to mark changes for the reviewers. It is not mandatory that you use the PDF of the accepted version as downloaded from the journal submission system, which the publisher marked as the accepted version. However, if you have trouble finding the accepted version of your paper on your computer, many journal submission systems store the accepted version for years. This handy guide provides simple-to-follow instructions for (corresponding) authors wishing to obtain an accepted version of their manuscript from the journal submission system of many publishers.
The green road is mostly known for self-archiving of journal articles; nevertheless, some publishers allow the self-archiving of book chapters as well. Have a look at the conditions some publishers have set and send us the accepted versions of your book-chapter publications to increase your visibility even further!
The published version is the final version of your article produced by the publisher with the journal's typeset and branding. In the digital environment, the published version is usually a PDF available through the publisher’s website, although for some online publications, the published version may be in HTML or other web-compatible file formats. Only a small number of publishers will allow this version to be made Open Access, even after an embargo. A few publishers, however, do allow this and we will make the published version of these articles Open Access in DORA on your behalf.
