APS Journals

Funder Compliance and Article Deposits

Policy effective for articles accepted for publication from 1 January 2027.

This pilot policy provides a sustainable route for immediate green open access for authors publishing in hybrid Physical Review journals. It allows authors to deposit their accepted manuscript to repositories without an embargo, provided specific criteria are met.

Can I deposit my manuscript immediately?

Publishing in the Physical Review journals gold open access with a CC-BY license enables researchers to comply with most – if not all – of the current open access and public access policies of funders. Gold open access articles may be deposited at any time in any repository, and may also be the version of record.

If you’re not able to publish gold open access, please see below.

Green open access

APS supports the immediate deposit of accepted manuscripts to the arXiv on the condition that it is not posted with a Creative Commons license (such as CC-BY).

For institutional, funder and other subject repositories, the following conditions apply for immediate deposit:

• You are an authorized user of a subscription to the journal (via your institution).
• You are posting to an institutional, funder, or non-commercial subject repository.
• You do not apply a Creative Commons license (e.g., CC-BY) to the posted manuscript.
  • If your funder or institution requires you to apply a CC-BY license to your accepted manuscript (e.g., ‘Rights Retention’ policies), this policy does not meet your requirements. You’ll need to publish your article gold open access.

There are no new fees for authors or subscribing institutions to take advantage of immediate green open access.

Where and when can I deposit my manuscript?

If you’re not publishing gold open access, use this table to determine where and when you can share your work.

Deposit conditions for accepted manuscripts:

• Provide a link/DOI to published article
• If the published article is not CC-BY:
  • Include the APS copyright notification (see below)
  • For arXiv postings use the arXiv.org perpetual, non-exclusive license 1.0

Copyright notice

When posting an accepted manuscript to a repository or website, please include the following notice and a link to the published article:

• © [Year] American Physical Society. This is the accepted manuscript of the following article:
• Author(s), “Article Title”, Journal Name, Vol. X, No. X, pp. XX–XX, [Year].
• The final published version is available from [DOI]. This manuscript version is posted with permission for non-commercial scholarly use.

What file versions are there?

Ensure you are uploading the correct file version:

• Preprint: the version of the article up to and including submission.
• Accepted manuscript: the version accepted by the journal after peer review, but prior to copyediting, typesetting, and metadata enhancement.
• Version of record: the published article on the APS platform that has undergone copyediting, typesetting, and metadata enhancement.

How to check if your institution is a subscriber

• Visit the relevant journal homepage and select a recent article.
• There is a notification in the top right corner of the article page and above the title of any visited article if you have subscription access.
  • It will look like this: or
  • If that isn’t present, make sure you’re logged in through your institution.
  • If you’ve got access, you’ll be able to read all the journal articles.
• If you’re unable to access current journal articles through a subscription, a 12-month embargo applies before you can deposit your accepted manuscript.

Need help?

• If you are required to publish open access with a CC-BY license, please review our gold open access options:
  • Open access pricing (article publication charges)
  • Open access agreements
  • SCOAP³
• Contact help@aps.org for questions regarding this policy.