National University Institutional Repository

• The Open Access repository requires agreement to a non-exclusive distribution license. The deposit does NOT require the transfer of copyright.
• You must have permission to grant the distribution license.  If your work has not been published elsewhere, you are good to go.

If your work has been published elsewhere, you will need to check your permissions in one of three ways:

1. Do-it-yourself - Use our guidelines (below) to check your publication agreement and verify the terms of your license. 

2. Schedule a 1-1 copyright consultation - Meet with our internal copyright expert to review your license terms. 

3. Ask us to check - Go ahead and submit your work to the repository, and select "I'm not sure - Can you help me?" under the Access question. Our team will review your publisher's standard licenses and follow up with you by email.

How to check your permissions:

Please read the license carefully. If you have any questions, please contact us or schedule 1-1 copyright consultation.

1. Find your license.
   1. Check your email for the original copyright agreement for your manuscript.
      • Review it to see whether there is language that specifies that you may make your work available via an institutional repository or a personal website.
   2. Use the Open Policy Finder list of publisher copyright policies and self-archiving. This allows you to search for the journal title or publisher if you do not have access to the copyright transfer agreement.
   3. Check the publisher's website for author licenses. 
2. Confirm what version you are allowed to deposit:
   • Published manuscript= the published version (i.e. with the publisher's formatting and page numbers).
   • Accepted manuscript = includes revisions made through the peer/editorial review process, but it should not include publisher branding or final editing.
   • Pre-print/submitted =  the article draft as you first submitted it for publication. It does not include revisions made through the peer/editorial review process, nor include publisher branding or final editing.
3. Confirm if there is an embargo on your manuscript.
   • This is a period of time post-publication that you must wait before the publisher allows it to be publicly shared in our repository.
   • An embargo does NOT prevent you from submitting to our open collection - we will automatically secure your full text until the embargo period had passed.  

Should you submit to the NU Scholarly Work (Restricted) collection? You should only submit to our restricted collection if you are unable to submit either

• any full text version of your work or
• a full text version that you are comfortable with. For example, the publisher may allow you to only submit the pre-pub version, but you may not be comfortable with that version being public.

In those cases, please instead submit your most complete (published or accepted) version of your manuscript to our restricted repository. Only the description, not the full text, be available to the public.