Research Guides: Scholarly Publishing: Sharing Your Work, Publishing Open Access

Sharing Your Scholarly Work

Sharing your work increases visibility, encourages collaboration, and can lead to higher citation counts. But sharing must be done legally and ethically, following publisher policies and copyright law.

What Can You Share?

It depends on:

What version of the work you want to share
Where you want to share it
Your publishing agreement
If you published Open Access (see next section)

Version	Definition	Can it be shared?	Common Outlets
Preprint	Original manuscript before peer review	Yes	Preprint servers, repositories
Postprint (Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM)	Peer-reviewed version before final formatting	Usually	Institutional repositories
Version of Record (VoR)	Final, publisher-formatted PDF	Rarely	Publisher site only unless OA or unless publishing agreement allows other options

Best Practices for Sharing

Check Open Policy Finder to review journal/publisher sharing policies
Review your publishing agreement to review specifics related to sharing
Include a full citation and DOI whenever possible
Link to the published version, if available
Label your manuscript version clearly: "Preprint", "Accepted Manuscript", etc.
Avoid uploading the final published PDF (VoR) unless the journal explicitly allows it
Consider publishing Open Access and share the VoR legally and easily

Publishing Open Access (OA)

Open Access (OA) publishing makes scholarly work freely available to anyone with an internet connection - without paywalls or subscription fees. OA helps maximize the reach, visibility, and potential impact of your research.

OA can apply to articles, books, datasets, creative works, and more. It benefits researchers, educators, students, and the public, especially those without an affiliation with an educational institution.

Learn more about how to publish OA on the Open Access guide.