As subscription and open access publication charges skyrocket, self-archiving has become the sought after mode for gaining high citations for research paper. This method of archiving allows the works of researchers to reach out to maximum number of people- peers in the research fraternity and also the common people. This helps maximize research impact by guaranteeing open access to all, regardless of their ability to pay.
What is self-archiving?
It is the practice of putting digital versions of scientific literature online making it freely available on the Internet for everyone to view. In other words, self-archiving makes your research widely visible, accessible, searchable, and useable, thereby increasing its reach and impact, and in the processing increasing the number of citations it receives.
When to self-archive?
Research paper can be self-archived either before the peer review process commences or after it has been peer reviewed and published.
Version of the paper printed before the peer review process begins is known as pre-print. Whereas refereed post-print is that version of the paper which is printed after the paper has been reviewed and published. All versions of papers available online are referred to as e-prints.
Where to self-archive?
Research articles can be self-archived in electronic repositories or on personal servers.
- Institutional repositories: Many universities provide scholars from their institutions to upload there research online for their peers to have free access to their work.
- Subject-based repositories: Some online repositories are subject specific and are every popular in that subject area. For example, PubMed for biomedical studies; arXiv most popularly for physics, mathematics, and computer science.
- Personal servers: Researchers upload their work on their personal web pages or some social networking sites specially created for researchers like ResearchGate.
There are two ways of self-archiving- green open access and gold open access. Most journals now days are providing authors these methods to help them increase citations of their work. Self-archiving is considered the future of archiving of paper where the authors as well as readers can without paying exorbitant price share as well as access researches and get information about the latest development happening.