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28 October 2023

OA Week 2023: Locating Postprints to Submit to FMRA

In yesterday's post, I noted that submitting postprints to FMRA is quick and easy because it's a mediated deposit process. This means the librarian who receives a submission will be the one who enters most of the relevant details into the bibliographic record that describes the contributed postprint. The principal task for authors is to locate a copy of their postprint and attach a PDF version of it to the FMRA submission form.

A postprint is defined as follows: "A digital draft of a research journal article after it has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication, but before it has been typeset and formatted by the journal." It is also referred to as the "author accepted manuscript" (AAM) or the "accepted manuscript." Basically, it's the version that has incorporated comments from peer reviewers and that the journal has accepted for publication. The content is essentially the same as that included in the final published version. It usually looks like a Word document, without any markings or formatting by the publisher.

However, keeping tracking of postprints can sometimes be challenging, in light of the number of revised versions generated when a manuscript is being considered for publication in a journal. So here are several helpful resources that describe in greater detail how to identify a postprint and how to find a copy of it:

Manuscript Detectives – Submitted, Accepted or Published? (Unlocking Research Blog) [this post is actually aimed at repository managers but the advice it provides is also relevant to authors]
Helping Authors Find AAMs (OA Works) [provides “instructions for authors to obtain an Author Accepted Manuscript from their Journal Submission System, where the AAM is stored during the publishing process”]

More generally, this toolkit provides advice on organizing and managing manuscript versions.

For actual examples of postprints that have already been deposited in repositories, take a look at this self-archiving explainer.

Finally, one solution* proposed by EIFL regarding the problem of locating postprint copies is for journal publishers to routinely provide them to their authors after their articles have been accepted. Perhaps that is something authors can suggest the next time they submit to a journal!

[scroll down to "Romy Beard"]

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