World Refugee Day Series: Open Access Materials - Postprints

A postprint is defined as "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." Other terms used are "author accepted manuscript" (AAM) or "accepted manuscript." Authors who self-archive or share free postprint versions of journal articles via repositories and websites are engaging in green open access. The benefits that authors gain from other types of open access are the same for the green route, that is, enhanced discoverability, increased usage and greater citation impact. The biggest difference is that green OA does not require authors to pay any fees to make their research freely available. 

Postprints tend to be deposited in either institutional or subject repositories. As such, they will generally appear in the search results of standard search engines like Google Scholar. That said, green versions of scholarly content can still be challenging to locate. Here are a few resources that can help: 

- Yesterday, I referenced the pages I maintain that list hybrid OA articles published in OUP's three refugee journals - those pages *also* record postprints that are available! See IJRL, JRS (2014-2021), JRS (2022+) and RSQ.

- I often discover postprints via the Unpaywall browser extension that I have installed on Chrome; it will display a green unlocked symbol when it has identified a free version of a paywalled article.

- Any postprints I reference on this blog are labeled as such; to view them, follow this link, then hit "ctrl-f" to open up the "find" function and look for instances of "postprint".

A primary remit of the Forced Migration Research Archive (FMRA) is to offer authors a space for  depositing their postprints. Here are two recent examples:

- "A Mile in Their Shoes: Understanding Healthcare Journeys of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK," International Journal of Migration, Health and Social Care, vol. 20, no. 2 (2024)

- "The Relationship between Human Rights and Refugee Protection: An Empirical Analysis," International Journal of Human Rights, vol. 25, no. 10 (2021)

For further guidance on self-archiving, both generally and in FMRA specifically, check out these blog posts: 

- OA Week 2023: Submitting to FMRA

- OA Week 2023: Locating Postprints to Submit to FMRA

- Tip: Explainer on Self-Archiving Postprints