Unless you have contractually transferred your copyright to an academic publisher, you are the copyright owner of your work and therefore have the right to make it Open Access. When an article is published in a journal or book, authors often sign a copyright transfer agreement, and the publisher's terms and conditions apply. Authors who wish to retain at least some of their rights can attempt to negotiate with the publisher inclusion of the SPARC Author Addendum.
Most publishers allow self-archiving (Green OA), sometimes after an embargo period. You can consult Sherpa Services for publisher policies and permissions.
Open Access Button has created a handy tool, Shareyourpaper.org, which allows authors to automatically and easily check how they can legally share their work.
Another Open Access Button tool, called Direct2AAM, provides authors with instructions on how to find their Author Accepted Manuscript (postprint) in the journal's submission system.
Scholarship@Claremont (S@C) archives research produced by The Claremont Colleges authors (faculty, students, staff, and researchers). It contains records of books, book chapters, journal articles, and working papers written by TCC-affiliated authors. Records of journal articles or papers may be accompanied by a full-text PDF file, to which access may be open or restricted, depending on the statute of the file. If necessary, an embargo period can be set. The repository is registered in OpenDOAR, and allows the researchers of The Claremont Colleges to meet the Open Access requirements of their funders.
