Perhaps you’ve shared article pre-prints or other forms of scholarly work with your colleagues over social media or email, or posted them to your personal website. Using a digital repository can make the common activity of exchanging work with colleagues easier and more stable.

Not all repositories behave exactly the same way, but as a general rule, by depositing work in a repository, you’ll get:

• A stable URL for the work that you can share with others or post to social media, your personal website, etc. This stable URL makes it easier for others to cite your work. You also won’t have to worry about broken links, or about migrating and re-posting your work to a new web page if you move to a new institution, or if your website moves to a new platform.
• Indexing by Google and Google Scholar, which makes your work more discoverable by others
• Some form of feedback about how the work has been used: how many views it has received, download counts, shares, etc.

There are many different scholarly repositories. Often they are focused on specific disciplines, such as medicine or physics.

In today's challenge, find out whether you can share your work in a repository!

1. Choose one of your recent publications (or a journal you are considering for an upcoming publication)
2. Look up the journal in Sherpa Romeo
3. Review that journal's policy to determine which version of your publication (if any) you are allowed to share in a repository

Most commonly, journals will permit you to share the final accepted manuscript, but not the final published version that appears on the journal's website. Many journals also place a time embargo - i.e. you have to wait a certain amount of time after the article is published before you can share it in an open repository.

All reputable repositories will ask you to certify that you own the rights to the work you are submitting. Unfortunately, many authors sign away all of their rights to journal publishers without trying to negotiate an alternative agreement. Before sharing your work in a repository or elsewhere, make sure you know what rights you have to that work. Here are some resources to help you:

If you want to take today's challenge a little further, choose one of your eligible publications and share it in a repository! Make sure to check your author agreement to confirm you have permission to share the article.