Penn State's open access policy, AC02, asks for “an electronic copy of the Author’s accepted manuscript … in an appropriate format (such as PDF).” This is the last version of the article that the author(s) edit, but copyediting may occur after the article is out of the author's hands. The policy covers this version of the article because it generally represents the final, peer-reviewed research, and default publishing contract generally give authors more rights to share it than to share the final published version.

If you are reluctant to share a particular article in accepted manuscript form because of changes that happened later, consider whether the publishing contract you signed would allow you to share a version with the necessary corrections. Some publishing contracts do. If yours does not, or if you prefer not to make your work open, you can get a waiver.

With questions about the open access policy, please contact the Libraries' Office of Scholarly Communications and Copyright.