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In the journal seminars at ACerS meetings, we emphasize that articles must be found to be cited. It’s a simple paradigm that is made difficult by the exploding number of scholarly articles published each year.
We provide advice for writing your papers so that they can be categorized properly by search engines and be found higher in the search engine results. However, while this information is helpful—and, dare I say, necessary—authors can be even more proactive in getting their manuscripts in front of colleagues, potential collaborators, grant administrators, and search committees through sharing.
While each publisher has their own processes and policies, most follow the same basic set of rules:
- Authors can e-mail their articles to colleagues.
- Gold open-access articles can be shared without limitation.
- Preprints can be shared widely.
- Subscription article sharing has limitations.
Wiley’s sharing policies are summarized in the infographic found at https://authorservices.wiley.com/asset/Article_Sharing_Guidelines.pdf. In addition, Wiley has several processes to make sharing as easy as possible.
The simplest form of sharing is directly emailing the article to your colleagues. For ACerS articles, an article can be shared at any stage of the publishing process for any type of submission. By emailing, you are ensuring that your article gets into the hands of people you know and who should be able to help your career move forward.
We have discussed the benefits of publishing articles as gold open access in prior CTTs, including here and here. Notably, authors retain the copyright of gold open-access articles, allowing them to freely distribute their articles.
A preprint is the submitted version of a manuscript prior to any journal peer review. Authors are allowed to post preprints, typically onto preprint servers such as Authorea, arXiv, and institutional sites.
Authors may also share preprints via other methods, with some limitations. Most importantly, posting the preprint to a commercial site that has not signed onto STM’s sharing principles is not allowed. (STM is the standard bearer for the academic publishing industry.) Unfortunately, these commercial sites are among the more popular academic sharing sites, though some are now working with publishers to honor the STM principles and copyright laws.
ACerS journals will soon be participating in Wiley’s “Under Review” service that links submissions to preprints via Authorea. This exciting service allows authors to simultaneously submit the manuscript to the journal for review and to Authorea for preprints. The status of the manuscript is posted onto the preprint throughout the review process. Once an article is published, the preprint is linked to the version of record.
Which brings us to articles published for subscription usage. People who have access to an institution that purchase subscriptions can read these articles. Also, ACerS members get full access to ACerS journal articles. People who do not fall into either of these categories must pay a fee to read or download subscription articles.
To help authors connect with readers, Wiley offers the generous “Article Share” program. With Article Share, authors can easily generate a unique sharing link to a full-text, read-only version of their article via their Author Services dashboard. Authors can share this link with an unlimited number of people for their noncommercial, personal use. Links can be shared via email, social media, personal websites or online profiles, institutional repositories, and/or Scholarly Collaboration Networks that are signatories to the Voluntary Principles for Article Sharing on Scholarly Collaboration Networks.
In conclusion, publishing with ACerS and Wiley provides easy options for article sharing as one of the many routes for helping authors reach the best audiences for their hard work.