Self-archiving

Self-archiving is the act of (the author's) depositing a free copy of an electronic document online in order to provide open access to it.

[1] The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer-reviewed research journal and conference articles, as well as theses and book chapters, deposited in the author's own institutional repository or open archive for the purpose of maximizing its accessibility, usage and citation impact.

[2] Self-archiving was first explicitly proposed as a universal practice by Stevan Harnad in his 1994 online posting "Subversive Proposal" (later published in Association of Research Libraries[3]) although computer scientists had been practicing self-archiving in anonymous FTP archives since at least the 1980s (see CiteSeer) and physicists had been doing it since the early 1990s on the web (see arXiv).

[6][7] A 2003 study by Elizabeth Gadd, Charles Oppenheim, and Steve Probets of the Department of Information Science at Loughborough University analysed 80 journal publishers' copyright agreements and found that 90 percent of publishers asked for some form of copyright transfer and only 42.5 percent allowed self-archiving in some form.

[14] Social reference management software websites such as Mendeley, Academia.edu, and ResearchGate facilitate sharing between researchers; however, these services are often subject to criticism for using scholars' contributions for commercial purposes[15] as well as for copyright violation.