Sharing my paper
My first paper was recently published. I wanted to know – can I put the paper up on this website?
Turns out, the answer is probably yes – at least for this paper published in PNAS. In general it depends on the journal; different journals allow different versions of the paper (preprint vs. accepted manuscript vs. publisher typeset manuscript) to be shared by the author. For a specific journal, a best guess can be found at SHERPA/RoMEO.
RoMEO gives PNAS a green rating, meaning their interpretation is that I can put the final version of the paper up here. Is this true? Hard to tell. The PNAS author FAQ site doesn’t explicitly say no, but does take pains not to explicitly say yes either:
For proper versioning and for article usage metrics, we prefer that you send colleagues a link to your article at PNAS Online. PNAS does not allow articles to be systematically distributed as PDFs by email, posted on listservs, or placed in open archives.
What about putting the paper on my ResearchGate profile (or Academia.edu, Mendeley, etc.)? It’s not exactly a personal website (which is apparently ok), but it’s not exactly an open archive like pubmed either (which PNAS says they disallow above). There is much discussion on the topic here and here (and even a paper which looks at if people are following the publisher rules on ResearchGate – turns out mostly no). In any case, I’ll just stick with making people hit the request button for now, or they’ll have to come here: