My author’s manuscript isn’t as good as the publisher version ...

By Grant Denkinson, open access lead in Library Research Services.

I have heard a number of times from authors, particularly in the humanities, that they are less enthusiastic about Green route Open Access. They say the final author version they make available is not as useful or aesthetically pleasing.

Since the looks of an author version are up to the author(s), I think there is a trade-off between time taken on look and feel vs time spent on other things, and perhaps diminishing returns on usability and enjoyment.

A few issues to consider:

Location: If you were given this paper without further context, as might happen if someone shared with a colleague via email or a collaborative workspace, would you know exactly what it is? Consider putting the citation at the front. Often the version of record will have a persistent identifier, a DOI, and we produce an identifier in our repository: a handle.net address. These should continue to work if websites are rearranged or moved. We are considering adding coversheets to documents to help with this.

Changes and comments: If you have been using change tracking or have reviewer comments in your manuscript, consider stripping them out and just sharing the final text. Most common authoring tools such as Word have this as an option.

Accessibility: I recommend making your work as widely available as possible and not disabling potential readers. Many ways of making a document more accessible also benefit users with mobile devices and allow computers to parse the work increasing discoverability. I won’t go into detail here but perhaps take a look at https://www.adobe.com/accessibility/pdf/pdf-accessibility-overview.html or other guides. We use PDF/A as an archiving format. If your manuscript contains data, consider sharing this as a supplement or using our University of Leicester research data repository

Some journals provide templates to help with style so you can do much of the typesetting yourself. There may be templates shared within your academic community also.

The future: Perhaps we will move to having both PDFs and other formats that lend themselves to uses other than replicating print.

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