Embargo Period for articles in the journals

Embargo Period  for articles in the journals

Authors of articles publishing them in journals, users accessing them and librarians involved in subscription of journals should be aware of the embargoed articles or the embargo period applied to the articles in journals. I tried to understand the concept.

Embargo period is length of time imposed by publishers for which authors need to wait  to make their articles publicly available (open access). It begins when an article is formally published online in final form (peer-reviewed version), which is the publication date of an article. embargo-lengths can be from 6–12 months or longer from the date of publication of article.

When embargo period expires authors can share their articles publicly in institutional repositories, personal websites, and social sites that target researchers without any restrictions, for the purpose of maximizing its accessibility, usage and citation impact.

It is needed for publishers to generate revenue  to support their activities and for journals to deliver value to subscribing customers before versions of articles become freely available.

Some  publishers have their journal embargo finder that provides the information of embargo period applied to each journal. In some cases the journal becomes open access but still embargo period is applied to some previously published articles.

Two types of embargo period

1. which applies for self archiving

Until the embargo period is over authors of articles are restricted to make the final version of their articles to be openly accessible to anyone and anywhere. They cannot deposit their articles (peer-reviewed version) on social platforms, institutional repositories, etc. which is generally done by authors to promote their research. If author submits the  article in institutional repository then only metadata will be open to public  during embargo period and full text article will be made available when embargo period is over.

Self-archiving is the act of (the author's) depositing a free copy of an electronic document online in order to provide open access to it. ^{(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-archiving)}

2.  which applies to open archive content

Open archive content  of publishers have the articles which are freely available to read and download. These articles are added to their archive when their embargo period is over and are open to subscribers and general public.

To know more:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embargo_(academic_publishing)

2. https://libguides.mmu.ac.uk/openaccess/definitions/embargo