Suppose you have the right to share some version of your journal article online. Where can you post it? Journals often allow authors to self-archive their work in these places:

• Institutional repository: An online database offered by a university or other institution for collecting, preserving, and sharing scholarly and creative works created by that institution’s community. CUNY’s institutional repository is CUNY Academic Works.
   
• Disciplinary repository: An institution-independent repository for researchers in a given field. Examples include arXiv (math, physics, computer science, etc.), bioRxiv (biology), RePEc (economics), and PhilArchive (philosophy). Knowledge Commons Works started as a humanities repository but now accepts research from any discipline. Zenodo also welcomes research from any discipline.
   
• Personal website or personal profile on institutional website: While many journals permit authors to post their articles to their personal website and/or personal profile on their institutional website, posting to these places leads to suboptimal discovery by Google Scholar and other search tools. Further, personal websites and profiles have limited lifespans, so they’re not the best options for long-term accessibility of the files in question. A better option is to post your work to CUNY Academic Works or a disciplinary repository and then link from your personal website or profile to the repository.
   
• Academic social networks: Some publishers allow authors to post their works to academic social networks such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate. Many do not. Regardless of what a journal allows, be aware that these sites are commercial enterprises that monetize user data, and that they will only last as long as they are profitable.