Penn State's open access policy, AC02, applies to scholarly articles written by university researchers at Penn State. The policy does not distinguish between articles where you are the corresponding author and articles where you are not.

We periodically send reminder emails about the open access policy. Because we send researchers no more than one email every six months, your coauthors may not receive reminder emails when you do.

Under U.S. copyright law, authors share copyright in the journal article. Customarily, the corresponding author signs a publishing agreement on behalf of all authors. Most publishing agreements today include rights for all authors to share their work with the public, especially the accepted manuscript version. If you don't have a copy of the publishing agreement signed by your corresponding author, Sherpa Romeo is a useful tool for looking up your journal's policies.

If you cannot or prefer not to share an article under the Penn State policy, you can get a waiver.

On articles with more than one Penn State author, an action by one author (waiving the policy for the article or making the article open) will apply for the other authors as well.

With questions, please contact the Office of Scholarly Communications and Copyright at openaccess@psu.edu.