RSP - OA

How can I share my work?

Often at acceptance, as part of the agreement you make with publishers, you hand over copyright to your research such that they can distribute it. As such, the publish can then control and limit how that research is shared and made public. If you choose to publish Gold Open Access, you will usually retain the rights to your work, but even if the publisher holds the copyright, there are often ways you can still make your work openly available. Your Copyright Transfer Agreement (CTA) will outline where and when you can share your published work, but the following two sites can also help you understand what you can do with your outputs.

How Can I Share It? - https://www.howcanishareit.com/

How Can I Share It is a site developed and dedicated to support Scholarly Sharing. The website has a variety of tools to support researchers to understand how they can share their work: "Where can I share it?" allows researchers to search the DOI of their publications to find out the specific access and usage rights associated with it; "How can I share it?" offers a list of various publisher's sharing policies, as well as information and support about alternative ways to share your work and to encourage scholarly sharing; "Share it here" collates various sharing platforms that allow researchers to share their work beyond the publisher's site.

Jisc: Sherpa Romeo - https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

Sherpa Romeo is a tool developed by Jisc to collate and present publisher and journal open access policies. The information is kept up to date, as new journals or updates to policy can be raised by anyone, and accurate as every registered publisher or journal held in Romeo is carefully reviewed and analysed by Jisc's specialist team who provide summaries of self-archiving permissions and conditions of rights given to authors on a journal-by-journal basis where possible.

Using Sherpa Romeo, you can lookup the policies of your chosen publisher and see how the various versions of your publication can be shared, where they can be shared, if there are any conditions to sharing it this way, and whether there is a fee associated with sharing it that way. 

If in doubt, the RSP team are here to help! If you are not sure whether or not the publisher will allow you to share a certain version of your publication in a certain way, you can always contact the team and we can advise you about what the publisher will allow.