You want to make your research more freely available. Your grant funder may even mandate you to make the products of your research open access (OA). However, you also want to publish in a particular journal because of its prestige in your field, and for promotion and tenure purposes. You don’t know if this journal publishes OA, or you find that it requires you to pay an author processing charge (APC) in order to make the article OA. These charges are often expensive and you had not planned them into your research budget. What can you do?

Self-archiving provides an answer! Most journals allow authors to self-archive. The self-archived article might be in final form as set by the journal, or in final submitted (“pre-print”) form. If you self-archive using MOspace, the University of Missouri System institutional repository, that material will be OA and accessible via internet search engines like Google.

How can you make this happen?

• BEFORE signing your final agreement to publish with the journal, check the journal’s policies on OA and self-archiving. This is easily done by using the SHERPA/ROMEO web site (https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ ).
• If the journal publisher’s default license, sent to you, does not allow for self-archive of your work into an institutional repository, request their license that allows self-archiving. Some journals will send this more permissive license only upon the author’s request. Only sign licenses that allow author self-archiving. 
• Contact MOspace (mospace@umkc.edu) and submit the appropriate version of the article (per the polices found in SHERPA/ROMEO for the journal).

UMKC Libraries is prepared and can help answer your questions about copyright issues as well as publisher licenses and funder mandates for self-archiving and open access. Contact Brenda Dingley, Director of Scholarly Communication, at 816-235-2226 or dingleyb@umkc.edu.