Open Scholarship Toolkit
Green Open Access
“Green OA” is often called "self-archiving" by publishers and refers to author-initiated open access. Authors can make their work open access by posting a version of their article in an open repository.
One advantage to choosing Green OA instead of Gold is that there is no cost associated with self-archiving and sharing your work, as there often is when making your research OA through a publisher. However, because the publisher holds the copyright on the published article, they control when, where, and what version can be posted. Contact your librarian or use Open Policy Finder to check journal-specific self-archiving policies.
Preprints and accepted manuscripts are the two most common article versions made available through Green OA.
Preprints
A preprint is a manuscript that has not yet been submitted to a journal and may never be. These manuscripts are submitted to a disciplinary preprint server, where they are freely available and are open for comments. Preprints allow for rapid dissemination of new research and the feedback received can strengthen the manuscript. Many preprint servers allow authors to incorporate feedback into the manuscript, before it is submitted for publication in a journal. Readers need to be clear that because preprints do not undergo peer review, conclusions may have changed prior to publication. Preprints may also be called Submitted Version, Author's Original Manuscript (AOM), or Original manuscript.
Accepted Version
The accepted version is the final author-created version of a manuscript that has been accepted for publication and incorporates referee comments made during peer review. However, it may lack final copy-editing and does not incorporate the journal’s layout or pagination. It is also known as: Authors Accepted Manuscript (AAM), Authors accepted version, Final Author version, and Post-print. Publishers may allow these to be shared through a disciplinary repository or an institutional repository, but often after an embargo period has passed.
Open Peer Review
Open Peer Review is a general term used to describe any peer review model in which aspects of the peer review process are made publicly available, either before or after publication. Many publishers and journals use open peer review practices. Services such as PCI offer open peer review of preprints.
-
PCI - Peer Community InPCI is a non-profit organization of researchers offering peer review, recommendation and publication of scientific articles in open access for free.
Institutional Repositories
An institutional repository is a collection of research and creative works by people affiliated with that institution. Typically, such a repository may include faculty and researcher articles, accepted manuscripts, preprints, research data, presentations, reports, and working papers. In other words, anything that is appropriate for a researcher's CV and for which copyright and author agreements allow deposit of the content.
Content archived in the University of Iowa's institutional repository, Iowa Research Online (IRO), is:
- discoverable by search engines such as Google and Google Scholar
- indexed and searchable in InfoHawk+, the University of Iowa Libraries' catalog
- hosted on a secure server and given a persistent URL to ensure permanent access
- registered with a digital object identifier (DOI) - for datasets, working papers, pre-prints, and accepted manuscripts
- openly accessible to researchers around the world who may have limited access to scholarly materials.
-
Iowa Research Online This link opens in a new windowIowa Research Online (IRO) collects and showcases the innovative research, scholarship, and creative work produced by the University of Iowa’s talented faculty, students, and staff. Its purpose is to foster discovery and collaboration as well as demonstrate the impact of teaching and learning in Iowa and beyond.
Disciplinary Repositories
Disciplinary repositories are publicly available online archives that host and distribute preprints, accepted manuscripts, working papers, etc.
-
arXiv.org This link opens in a new windowarXiv is a pre-print and open-access archive for scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.
-
bioRxiv This link opens in a new windowbioRxiv (pronounced “bio-archive”) is a preprint server for the life sciences operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Articles are not peer-reviewed or edited, although all articles undergo basic screening for non-scientific content and plagiarism, and for material that might pose a health or biosecurity risk.
-
medRxiv This link opens in a new windowmedRxiv (pronounced "med-archive") is a free online archive and distribution server for complete but unpublished manuscripts (preprints) in the medical, clinical, and related health sciences. Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been peer-reviewed.
-
PsyArXivA free preprint service for the psychological sciences. Maintained by The Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science. Powered by OSF Preprints
-
SocArXivSocArXiv, open archive of the social sciences, provides a free, non-profit, open access platform for social scientists to upload working papers, preprints, and published papers, with the option to link data and code. SocArXiv is dedicated to opening up social science, to reach more people more effectively, to improve research, and build the future of scholarly communication.
- Last Updated: Jun 5, 2025 3:07 PM
- URL: https://guides.lib.uiowa.edu/open
- Print Page