Most publishers allow authors to share versions of their work, subject to several conditions. If your published work has a DOI, you can use shareyourpaper.org to walk through checking to see whether and how you can share your work. Sherpa Romeo is another good resource for finding publisher and journal policies on self-archiving. Typically, publisher policies specify the following details for sharing your work:
- Timing: Some publishers require an embargo before sharing your work – authors must wait a set period of time after the journal version is first published before making their work freely available online. (Many journals do not require an embargo, however.)
- Platform: Most publisher policies specify exactly where article versions can be shared, for example permitting sharing in institutional repositories like Libra but barring sharing on for-profit academic social networks like Academia.edu and ResearchGate.
- Version: Most publisher policies do not permit sharing the final published version of your work, with the typesetting, pagination, etc. of the final PDF. However, they increasingly do permit sharing pre-prints (the version of your article that was submitted for peer review) and Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAMs) (also known as post-prints, the final text version of a paper that has been revised in response to peer review but not yet typeset and formatted by a publisher).
- License: Most open access advocates believe that to be fully open, a work should have an open license permitting reuse by others, preferably a CC-BY license allowing unlimited reuse subject only to proper attribution. However, many publishers require more restrictive licenses, or do not permit any open license at all.
- Link to published version: To ensure that readers associate a free version with the correct final published article, publishers typically require (and libraries encourage) that authors include citation information (including a link or DOI) for the final published version as part of the record for their deposited open version(s).
Again, check Sherpa Romeo and then confirm on the publisher’s website (as Sherpa is not always up-to-date with its digest/analysis of publisher policies, but is typically a good source for links to the publisher’s website) the precise details of your journal’s policy if you use this method of sharing your work.