Elsevier Policies

Hosting articles

Platforms such as repositories, preprint servers and scholarly collaboration networks can host research published by Elsevier following the guidelines below.

Principles

The following principles underpin our hosting policy:

Elsevier supports the STM Article Sharing Principles opens in new tab/window and we want to work in partnership with organizations aggregating, and making available, versions of articles published by researchers with Elsevier
- This policy complements our sharing policy, which outlines how authors can share their research, and agreements with subscribing institutions about how licensed material can be shared
We believe that we all have a shared responsibility to work together to ensure researchers can share research quickly, easily and responsibly
- This requires active partnering to ensure the coherence and integrity of the scientific record, to promote responsible sharing in a way that respects the needs of all stakeholders, and to enable impact and usage measurement in a distributed environment
Hosting platforms should develop and share COUNTER compliant opens in new tab/window usage statistics so that researchers and publishers have a full picture of how articles are shared and used
Where commercial organizations seek to benefit from hosting versions of articles on their platforms, formal commercial arrangements should be made with Elsevier. Non-commercial organizations can host documents under the terms of this policy.
Sites or repositories that provide a service to other organizations or agencies, even if those other organizations or agencies are themselves non-commercial entities, are considered to be providing a commercial service, and this service activity will also require a commercial arrangement with Elsevier

Non-commercial platforms

Guidance for non-commercial organizations and institutional repositories:

Preprint

Preprints can be hosted anytime, anywhere
If accepted for publication, then hosting organizations should link via the DOI from the preprint to the formal publication
- Millions of researchers have access to the formal publications, and those links will help your users to find, access, cite and use the best available version
arXiv and RePEc can update a preprint immediately with the accepted manuscript and a DOI link to the formal publication
Please note: Some society-owned titles and journals that operate double-anonymized peer review have different preprint policies, please check the journals Guide for Authors for further information
- Preprints should not be added to or enhanced in any way in order to appear more like, or to substitute for, the final versions of articles

Accepted manuscript

A research institute can host its employees' and students' accepted manuscripts immediately for internal institutional use or private scholarly sharing as part of an invited research collaboration work group
- After an embargo period opens in new tab/window passes the manuscript can also be shared publicly
Internal institutional use means use for classroom teaching and internal training at the institution (including use in course packs and courseware programs, but not in MOOCs), and inclusion of the manuscript in applications for grant funding
Other non-commercial organizations can host manuscripts after the embargo period opens in new tab/window has passed and the manuscript can be shared publicly

In all cases, accepted manuscripts should:

Link to the formal publication via its DOI
Bear a CC-BY-NC-ND license — this is easy to do
Not be stored on an insecure network, or be discoverable or accessible except as described above
Not be added to or enhanced in any way to appear more like, or to substitute for, the Published Journal Article
Not be used or posted for commercial gain without a formal agreement with Elsevier
Not be used to substitute for services provided directly by the journal, for example, article aggregation, systematic distribution via e-mail lists or list servers or share buttons, posting or linking by commercial companies for use by customers of such companies (e.g., pharmaceutical companies and physician-prescribers)

Published journal article (PJA)

Policies for hosting published journal articles differ for subscription articles and gold open access articles:

Subscription articles

Theses and dissertations which contain embedded PJAs as part of the formal submission can be hosted by the awarding institution with DOI links back to the formal publications on ScienceDirect
If you are a library that subscribes to ScienceDirect, for example, you have additional private sharing rights under this agreement
- Final versions of articles may be shared for internal institutional use which means use for classroom teaching and internal training at the institution (including use in course packs and courseware programs), and inclusion of the article for grant funding purposes
Otherwise sharing is by agreement only

Gold open access articles

May be hosted according to the author-selected end-user license
- This license should appear on the hosted version of the article along with a DOI link to the citable version of record on ScienceDirect

Commercial platforms

Guidance for commercial organizations: