Adding full text to Open Research Online

Journal articles

For most journal articles, you will have signed a copyright agreement or licence to publish form upon acceptance of your paper. This does not mean you cannot make a copy of your work openly available in ORO.

Most publishers will not permit the final published version to be made openly accessible, but the vast majority will allow you to deposit the Author's Accepted Manuscript. This is the version that has been peer-reviewed, includes the corrections/comments of the reviewers, and has been accepted for publication but has not had changes from copy editing or type setting. You may have this version in Microsoft Word format.

This version can be attached to your ORO submission, along with any separate files containing figures and tables. A member of the ORO team will check the Open Access (OA) policy of the publisher before making the item live on ORO.

If the full text cannot be deposited, it will be locked from public view; if an embargo is required, this will be added; or if it is discovered that the publisher does in fact allow the final published PDF to be deposited, then the Accepted Manuscript version you attached will be replaced. For more information on the OA policies of academic journals publishers visit the Sherpa Romeo database: SHERPA/RoMEO Publisher copyright policies and self archiving

Book chapters

Publishers may not have standard OA policies for book chapters in the same way they do for journal articles. Nevertheless, guidance is becoming more common and we may be able to make accepted versions of book chapters available via ORO.  Please deposit the full text of a book chapter, and we will check whether the publisher will allow the chapter to be available via ORO.

Books

We do not seek to make the complete text of books openly available in ORO, unless they have been published Gold Open Access. Books differ greatly to journal articles, book chapters, and other research output types in that they are not "author-giveaway" works. That is, the author or authors of a book are likely to be receiving royalties on sales, and therefore it is not appropriate to compromise that potential through making the text openly accessible.

It is still worth depositing bibliographic-only records of books you've written in ORO, not only for completeness of your publications list, but to help generate sales through links to the publisher's site.

Conference items

Unless you have signed copyright over to the conference organiser, or signed an exclusive licence to publish form, then copyright for that conference item will reside with you, the author. You may therefore deposit the full text in ORO.

Some conference organisers will publish the proceedings of the conference as a book; in these situations you may well have assigned copyright to a third party. However, if you have been asked to "extend", "write-up", or "develop" your conference paper for journal submission, only the copyright for that extended or developed version will reside with the journal publisher. Copyright of the original conference version will still reside with you.

Other research output types

When thinking about depositing the full text of other output types in ORO, apply the same principles as outlined under "Conference items" above. In other words, if you've not assigned copyright to a third party, then the copyright remains with you and you can do what you like with the full text. If you have assigned copyright (e.g. for externally-funded research reports, the commissioning body may hold the copyright), then you would need to seek permission for ORO deposit.