"Green" open access refers to when an article is published in a traditional journal, but then a version of the article is made available in a publicly-available repository. Commonly, these are referred to as "preprints" or "author accepted manuscripts" - denoting they are a complete version of the manuscript, but have not necessarily undergone peer review or a formal editing process. The process of uploading your work to a repository is often called "self-archiving" your work. Some repositories also accept the final, peer-reviewed version of articles, such as PubMed Central.
Publishers and journals differ in their policies regarding how and when authors can self-archive their work in repositories. Sherpa Romeo is a useful tool that can tell you if the journal your work has been accepted to allows self-archiving. See the box below for more information.
Your ability to self-archive your work will depend on the publishing agreement you have signed with the journal publishing your work. If you retain the copyright to your work, or publish your work under a Creative Commons license, you can upload your work to a repository. If you have signed away your author rights, many publishers still allow you to self-archive your work, sometimes after an embargo period of 6 months to a year.
To learn more about whether or not you can archive your work, see the Sherpa Romeo tool below, check the author guidelines of the journals you have published in, or reach out to a librarian for help.
In many cases, you may be required to make your work publicly available in a repository to comply with funder requirements. For example, all research funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH) is required to make the final, peer-reviewed version of the manuscript available in PubMed Central.
If you are unsure of your research funder's public access policy or don't know how to comply with the policy, reach out to your liaison librarian for assistance. We can help you understand the policy, work through any rights issues with publishers, and identify repositories where you can submit your work.
There are a wide variety of subject and institutional repositories that can be used to archive you work. Subject repositories accept work from authors from any institution, so long as the work is in-scope of the repository's disciplinary focus. Institutional repositories collect all the work published by authors from a specific academic institution. It is recommended that authors archive their work in both types of repositories when possible.
The A.T. Still Memorial Library is currently in the process of launching an institutional repository, keep an eye out for more information in the near future.
Below is a list of health sciences subject repositories that may accept your work.