Announcing Direct2AAM: Helping Authors Find Author Accepted Manuscripts

To make it easier for authors to self-archive simply, quickly, and correctly, we’ve created Direct2AAM, a set of guides to turn the often unsuccessful hunt for author accepted manuscripts (AAM) into a simple set of instructions that’ll always bring results. The guides, available for most major journals, provide easy to follow instructions for authors to obtain an Author Accepted Manuscript from their journal submission system, where the AAM is stored during the publishing process.

You can read, reuse, and contribute to the Direct2AAM guides on our website.

The guides work by giving authors jargon free, step-by-step instructions for going direct to their AAMs within journal submission systems. We developed these in response to authors’ and librarians’ feedback that hunting for copies on hard-drives and inboxes is too often confusing, frustrating, and ultimately unsuccessful. Instead, journal submission systems, which are typically used to manage the publication process for authors, provide a straightforward and authoritative source of AAMs.

Direct2AAM forms an important part of the Open Access Button’s efforts to dramatically increase self-archiving rates, and the guides build on lessons learned running the our request system. Through the request system, we systematically and rigorously test both novel and not so novel strategies for encouraging authors to self-archive. While doing this, we’ve seen first hand just how many authors struggle to find the right copies to archive, and we know from collaborations with the repository community that we’re not alone. These guides complement our “Article Version Explainer” resource which outlines, with simple explanations and images, the difference between key article versions for self-archiving.

We’re releasing these guides early to get input on and insight into their use. We will continue to develop and improve this resource, and we hope to work with the community in doing so. Currently, our next steps for these guide include refining their content, moving it to stand-alone pages, adding images, supporting data on which journals use which submission systems, and A/B testing success with the guides. We’ll also integrate them into our Open Access Button deposit pages, which already provide a route for authors to deposit and archive content legally without manual meta-data entry or policy checking.

Thank you to the authors and experts who provided input during the creation of Direct2AAM, and Natalia Norori who worked to collate and consolidate their work! Thanks to the Arcadia Fund for providing the support that made the creation of these guides possible.

To start using the guides, go to openaccessbutton.org/direct2aam. To learn about our other tools for libraries and sign up to be notified when we have future releases, go to openaccessbutton.org/libraries.