Open Access

Often after publication, authors are encouraged to share and distribute their works to boost the visibility of their research. Depositing a permissible version of your publication in OA repositories is one way to make your work freely accessible to everyone. This route to making your research open is known as Green OA. 

As a PolyU author, which version can I make open access in repositories?

In PolyU, if your work is not published in open access, you are required to upload the "Final Accepted Manuscript" to PolyU Institutional Research Archive (PIRA), our Institutional Repository, to be made open access. Learn how to deposit works in PIRA here. 

As illustrated in the graphic below, Final Accepted Manuscript is the version after peer review without typesetting and formatting done by the publisher. Usually, this version is allowed to be shared in OA repositories. The Published Version, on the other hand, is normally not allowed to be shared in the same way due to copyright restrictions, unless the article is published in open access. Learn more about versions of manuscript here.

If your work is published in open access (Gold OA), you can still deposit the Published version in PIRA to archive an additional copy of your work in an OA repository. 

Gold OA is the other way of making your research open access, in most cases, by paying an APC for your article. Learn more about Gold OA here.

Be cautious when uploading works to a commercial site, such as ResearchGate.

Occasionally you may be "invited" to upload your works to ResearchGate, or other similar scholarly social networking platforms. Again, make sure you are sharing the copyright-permissible version. Note that publishers may not allow authors to share, even accepted manuscripts, on these platforms. If you are not sure, you can choose to upload your work in private mode, and share it through email or private channel upon the reader's request.

You are always encouraged to upload your works to PIRA and include links to the works on other platforms.

To make your works more visible to your own research community, you may also deposit a version of your work (pre-print or accepted manuscript) in a subject-specific OA repository. Below are some examples. 
 

Subject-specific OA Repositories

	Owned and operated by Cornell University, arXiv.org provides e-print archive and distribution service in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics.
	PubMed Central (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine.
	Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research and is composed of a number of specialized research networks in each of the social sciences.
	CogPrints is an electronic archive for self-archive papers in the areas of Psychology, Neuroscience, Linguistics, Computer Science, Philosophy, Biology, Medicine, Anthropology, etc.

To find more OA repositories, check OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories, an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories).