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It's been a couple of years that the paper was published in EPL. But uploading it to arXiv will make it accessible even for normal people without any institution access.

I don't know about any rules or regulations or the terms and conditions that I had agreed upon. So I am asking it here.

Please let me know whatever you know. I tried googling but didn't find any relevant results.

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    Did you publish this as open access?
    – Buffy
    Commented Sep 4 at 14:11
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    @Buffy I would assume not, given "uploading it in arxive will make it accesible even for normal people without any institution access".
    – Anyon
    Commented Sep 4 at 14:14
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    @Anyon, many, maybe all IOP journals seem to be open-access. Hence my answer deletion.
    – Buffy
    Commented Sep 4 at 14:19
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    @Buffy I don't know what percentage of IOP journals are only open-access, but many are hybrid open-access, where authors can choose to publish as a subscription article or pay for open access. EPL is one example.
    – Anyon
    Commented Sep 4 at 14:27
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    What has your prior research shown? Does the journal have a preprint policy?
    – user2705196
    Commented Sep 4 at 14:36

2 Answers 2

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For the general question of "can I submit a paper to arXiv that has already been published in a journal":

arXiv does not appear to have any policy against uploading a previously published article per se.

However, in their submission terms, arXiv requires that the "distribution of the [submitted work] by arXiv will not violate any rights of any person or entity, including, without limitation, any rights of copyright," and also requires that the submitted work "is not subject to any agreement, license, or other claim" that could interfere with arXiv's ability to host/distribute the work you're uploading. (If there are any other authors on this paper, they would also need to agree to post it to arXiv, as well, but that's secondary to the copyright/licensing issues.)

So whether you can submit a previously published article to arXiv depends primarily upon the terms you agreed upon/license granted to the publishing journal. The journal may have the exclusive copyright on your work - while many journals carve out explicit exceptions that allow authors to distribute copies of their work in certain circumstances, it is very possible that putting the whole text of an article published in a journal on arXiv is a violation of that copyright, and thus also against arXiv's terms of use.

It is possible that prior versions of a work which are NOT under copyright from the journal can be submitted to arXiv, but this is a somewhat murky area and you/arXiv might still have issues.

TL;DR: you need to know the exact terms of your agreement with the journal to know if you can submit the article to arXiv or not.

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    I guess I have to find out the terms and conditions I signed. But what if I can't find that paper?
    – souraj ghosh
    Commented Sep 5 at 0:29
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    @sourajghosh You can try contacting the journal to either get a copy of the agreement or ask them their policies about posting to arXiv. If you aren't able to find that agreement, I would strongly consider not posting. If the journal isn't okay with it, they could make a mild headache for arXiv, and arXiv may not be inclined to allow you to submit preprints in the future if you are caught violating their submission policies.
    – WhatTheDuck
    Commented Sep 5 at 14:14
  • Thank you @WhatTheDuck. I will try to find the copy and in case I don't then I will mail them and upload it only if arXive doesn't face any problem.
    – souraj ghosh
    Commented Sep 6 at 12:01
  • Cannot prove a negative and all, but I have never heard of authors or ArXiv getting into trouble for putting the prior-to-publishing copy online. While in contrast people have been getting into trouble for making scientific, payed-for-with-public-funding-copyrighted-afterwards research available, see Sci-Hub and also Aaron Swartz.
    – Ivana
    Commented Sep 6 at 12:55
  • @Ivana Me neither, as far as I know arXiv doesn't care if you submit prior-to-published articles with them. I wanted to point out that the JOURNAL might, and their recourse would be to go to arXiv to request the article be taken down, and arXiv might take issue with an author that violated their policies about posting articles that have licensing/copyright issues. I don't think many of these things are likely, but since the original question is explicitly looking to find a way to make some version of the article available around a paywall, it bears mentioning.
    – WhatTheDuck
    Commented Sep 6 at 14:11
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You could ask the journal to send you a copy of the agreement you signed. But, assuming by EPL you mean the physics journal published by IOP, most likely you are able to post (at least) the version prior to peer review following this policy. As far as I'm aware, It has not changed substantially in the last "couple of years".

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  • I read that link publishingsupport.iopscience.iop.org/…. If I signed/agreed on something similar then all I have to do is 'find the version before peer reviewd'. I am not sure how to ask the journal to send me a copy of our agreement, in case I don't find it. Do I need to just mail them?
    – souraj ghosh
    Commented Sep 5 at 0:38
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    @sourajghosh Yes, I would just email the editorial office and ask if they can help - either by sending a copy (ideal outcome) or just by letting you know what preprint policy might apply. Anyway, a lesson for the future would be that it's a good idea to save (and backup!) both agreements you enter and (at least) milestone versions of manuscripts. Doesn't cost much to store such files, and you never know when they'll come in handy.
    – Anyon
    Commented Sep 5 at 2:26
  • Thank you @Anyon. I wlii just mail them. And in future I wlii be cautious.
    – souraj ghosh
    Commented Sep 6 at 12:02

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