Author Posting of IEEE Copyrighted Papers Online

The IEEE Publication Services & Products Board (PSPB) last revised its Operations Manual Section 8.1.9 on Electronic Information Dissemination (known familiarly as "author posting policy") on 7 December 2012.

PSPB accepted the recommendations of an ad hoc committee, which reviewed the policy that had previously been revised in November 2010. The highlights of the current policy are as follows:

• The policy reaffirms the principle that authors are free to post their own version of their IEEE periodical or conference articles on their personal Web sites, those of their employers, or their funding agencies for the purpose of meeting public availability requirements prescribed by their funding agencies. Authors may post their version of an article as accepted for publication in an IEEE periodical or conference proceedings. Posting of the final PDF, as published by IEEE Xplore®, continues to be prohibited, except for open-access journal articles supported by payment of an article processing charge (APC), whose authors may freely post the final version.
• The policy provides that IEEE periodicals will make available to each author a preprint version of that person's article that includes the Digital Object Identifier, IEEE's copyright notice, and a notice showing the article has been accepted for publication.
• The policy states that authors are allowed to post versions of their articles on approved third-party servers that are operated by not-for-profit organizations. Because IEEE policy provides that authors are free to follow public access mandates of government funding agencies, IEEE authors may follow requirements to deposit their accepted manuscripts in those government repositories.

IEEE distributes accepted versions of journal articles for author posting through the Author Gateway, now used by all journals produced by IEEE Publishing Operations. (Some journals use services from external vendors, and these journals are encouraged to adopt similar services for the convenience of authors.) Authors' versions distributed through the Author Gateway include a live link to articles in IEEE Xplore. Most conferences do not use the Author Gateway; authors of conference articles should feel free to post their own version of their articles as accepted for publication by an IEEE conference, with the addition of a copyright notice and a Digital Object Identifier to the version of record in IEEE Xplore.