Any member of the Penn State community can deposit an article via this method.
- Ensure that the accepted manuscript or final published version of your article is accessible to the public free of charge no later than the date of publication:
- In an open access repository such as arXiv, Penn State Law eLibrary, or Dickinson Law IDEAS (articles posted on social networks such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu do not qualify); or
- On the publisher’s website.
- Wait for the Researcher Metadata Database to detect your publication and locate the open access version. Adding metadata for the publication to Activity Insight, if you use it, will help us to detect your publication. If we detect your publication but do not find an open access version, we will request a copy of the open access version from you via email. You can provide a URL for the open access version at that time.
- If your article is not detected within six months of publication, please contact the Office of Scholarly Communications and Copyright and deposit your work via another method.
Some publishers may require payment of an Article Processing Charge (APC) in exchange for making your article available to the public free of charge on their websites. Please note that you do not need to pay an APC in order to comply with the open access policy. Many journals, open access and otherwise, do not charge a fee for publication. You can then comply with the policy by self-archiving your work or by getting a waiver.
The Researcher Metadata Database uses Open Access Button to identify open access versions of scholarly articles. Open Access Button searches a variety of sources, including the Unpaywall database. Ensuring that the repository or publication you choose is listed in Unpaywall’s data sources will help ensure that we find the open access version of your article.