When you publish in a Royal Society of Chemistry journal, our standard licence allows you to make the accepted manuscript of your article freely available after a 12-month embargo period. This is known as the green route to open access.
If you wish to make your article's final published version of record freely available you'll need an open access licence, as explained on our Gold open access page.
How do I publish green open access?
1. Submit your article
Submit to your chosen journal as normal; our standard licence to publish will allow you to make the accepted manuscript of your article freely available after a 12-month embargo period.
An accepted manuscript is a version of an article which has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication, but hasn't been copy edited or formatted for final publication.
During the publication process, your article will usually go through several changes and versions, including the following:
- a pre-submission draft version (sometimes called a pre-print or author's original version)
- one or more revised draft versions, created during the peer review process
- a peer-reviewed version that is accepted for publication (the accepted manuscript)
- the final version that appears in a journal with a permanent identifier (the version of record)
Accepted manuscripts contain accurate, peer-reviewed content, so making an accepted manuscript freely available is one way of satisfying open access mandates. However the format of an accepted manuscript may not meet academic publishing standards. Only the version of record is professionally formatted and edited for journal publication.
Other terms you might hear for accepted manuscripts include 'post-print', 'author's final version', 'author's accepted version', and in the context of repositories, 'deposited version'. If you choose to publish via the green open access route with the Royal Society of Chemistry, our standard licence restricts how you may share your accepted manuscript and version of record. Other publishers may enforce different restrictions.
2. Wait for embargo period to end
An embargo is a period of time when access to published content is temporarily restricted. If you choose to publish an article using the green open access route, your publisher will usually require an embargo before you may make your article freely accessible. Some people call this 'delayed open access'.
At the Royal Society of Chemistry, our standard licence requires an embargo period of 12 months.
During the embargo period:
- your article's version of record is published in one of our journals, where it is available to subscribers
- restrictions apply to how you may distribute other versions of your article.
Chemical Sciences Article Repository
We have now closed our separate repository for open access articles where, at the request of the author, we made accepted versions of their articles freely available after the embargo period of 12 months. We took the decision to close the repository after changes in the open access environment indicated that a separate repository would not be the most effective way to support open access within the community.
Author versions of articles published in our journals that we previously committed to publish green open access in the repository are still accessible from the journal at http://pubs.rsc.org and we are committed to supporting authors in publishing green open access in future.
Get more information on how to satisfy your funders’ green open access mandates.
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