In order to submit work to CUNY Academic Works, you must hold the copyright to the work or have the approval of the copyright holder(s) to submit the work. Submitters who deposit works grant to CUNY the non-exclusive right to archive and distribute the work through CUNY Academic Works and any successor initiatives. Entering into this agreement does not alter your copyright or other rights you may hold.
It is incumbent on the submitter of a work to verify and confirm that they have permission to publish it. All works submitted to CUNY Academic Works must be freely and openly available. For Academic Works at Baruch, we will only accept works that can be made publicly available without restrictions.
Many journals now permit authors to archive a version of their published article on an institutional repository - e.g. the final draft post-peer review. Some may require an embargo period (Academic Works can do that), and/or a link to the article of record on the publisher’s site. You can check with your publisher to determine the repository policy before submitting the work. If you set an embargo period, the metadata record for the work will reside in the repository but the work itself will not be publicly available until the embargo expires.
Many publishers provide information on their policies on their websites. The SHERPA/RoMEO website provides a summary of many journal publishers' archiving policies and indicates whether you can share: the final published version of the article (publisher's PDF), the final peer-reviewed manuscript you submitted without the publisher's formatting and branding (post-print), or the initial manuscript you submitted prior to peer-review (pre-print). The site also provides direct links to the publisher's copyright policies.
As open access has become more common, conventional publishers have become more amenable to including open-access-friendly terms in their contract, either by default or upon negotiation with the author.
If you already signed a publishing contract with a conventional publisher, you should first evaluate the terms of your contract to determine if it allows you to make your work openly accessible and, if so, under what terms. If it does not, you may need to work with your publisher to secure permission or regain the right to make your work openly accessible. Publishers are often open to work with authors to make their works available in the way the author wants, particularly when a work is no longer profitable to the publisher.
