Here’s a great reference if you’ve published or are planning to publish in an academic journal: a reference to the self-archiving policies of many, many journals. Basically it answers the question, “can I put a free download of my paper on my personal/university website?”.

Click here to see all of them at once, but that would take a while. According to Open Access News, there are 10 000 journals in the database. And the short answer is: yes. 91% of them support self-archiving. That’s very good news.

There’s some jargon around this issue. I think “green” open access means authors can voluntarily choose to distribute their own papers for free but the journal itself (which is where most search engines are likely to find the article) requires a subscription to access them. “Gold” open access means the journal doesn’t require a reader to pay to see the research. The RoMEO database also breaks it up into blue and yellow. Oh boy.

Looks like Remote Sensing of Environment does allow post-print archiving. Yay!