Parallel publishing is one of two ways to publish Open Access (the other is to publish in Open Access journals). Parallel publishing, by depositing a copy of an article in an institutional or subject online archive, is a way for the scientist to make his/her publication freely available even when the journal which has accepted and published it is not an Open Access journal. Parallel publishing is often used as a synonym to self-archiving, though self-archiving can also mean that the author makes an article available on his/her own private web page. Raym Crow of SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) defines an open institutional archive as:
/.../ a digital archive of the intellectual product created by the faculty, research staff and students of an institution and accessible to end users both within and outside of the institution (Crow 2002).
An open archive can be institutional, like for example the SLU Epsilon open archive, or subject based like Organic Eprints which archives documents on organic agriculture. In both cases anyone with an Internet connection can access the material.
Local depositing - global access
Even though an article is deposited in an electronic local archive like the open archive at SLU, its circulation will be global. The way this works in detail can be described by the routines the library follows when adding an article to the archive. It has to do with metadata - i.e. the bibliographic description of the document. In order to use the interoperability between different archives, i.e to navigate, analyze and retrieve documents in more than one open archive at a time, it is vital that everyone describes the documents in the same way, regardless of which archive the article was deposited in (Carr and Harnad 2007).
The metadata model or description of the publications in open archives has been developed by the Open Archives Initiative and the standard protocol is called OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative - Protocol for Metadata Harvesting). It was developed by scientists in co-operation with research libraries in the USA in 1999.
This standard can be used regardless of the content form of the database. Today, most archives containing scientific material support OAI-PMH. A good example of how this works in practice is OAIster, which retrieves scientific documents from more than 1100 universities, research organizations and institutes all over the world. The distribution ways for articles that have been parallel published are well developed and keep getting better, which makes these articles visible and accessible not only in traditional sources but also where articles published in traditional journals normally don't appear. This benefits the author, as well as those interested in his/her research.
Publishers' Open Access policies
Elsevier:
Elsevier allows the author to parallel publish the article on a personal or institutional server. This means publishing in the SLU Epsilon Open archive is allowed with no need for a special agreement to be signed. Some conditions apply: The source name must be cited (i.e. journal name, volume, number and pages), a link to the journal's or publisher's webpage must be supplied, and the publisher PDF version cannot be used when depositing (this means the author does have the right to deposit the final version of the text itself, as it appears before the publisher applies the company logotype, text formatting and so on). A link to the article DOI (Digital Object Identifier) must also be included.
Springer Verlag:
Springer shares most of it conditions with Elsevier. Springer too requires that a set phrase with a link to the original publication is provided with the parallel published version: "The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com".
Taylor & Francis:
Taylor & Francis too allows parallel publishing, with no need for a special agreement to be signed. As with the previous publishers, the deposit must be made on a non-commercial server, the source must be clearly defined with links to the publisher and the journal, and the publisher PDF cannot be used. Taylor & Francis embargoes STM journals (Science, Technology and Medicine) for 12 months and SSH journals (Social Sciences and Humanities) for 18 months.
The information above on some publishers' policies was collected from the SHERPA/RoMEO website. Their search service RoMEO is designed to be a guide for authors wanting to parallel publish in an open archive. A large number of publishers and their copyright policies can be found here.
The Epsilon staff at the SLU libraries will be happy to help you make your publications comply with your publisher's conditions and to answer any questions you might have regarding parallel publishing.