Elsevier has a long tradition of liberal copyright policies and for many years has permitted both the posting of preprints on public servers and the posting of manuscripts accepted for publication on secure internal servers. Now authors of articles published in Elsevier journals may also post the final version of their manuscript, as accepted by the journal, publicly on their personal website or their institution's website (including institutional repository). The “final version” is the author’s Word (or Text or similar word processing) file, which can be updated by the author to incorporate changes made during peer review.

Authors do not need to ask Elsevier’s permission to do this. They need to include in each such posting a full citation of the published journal article (once known) and a link to the homepage of the journal on ScienceDirect or, better, the DOI of the published article.

The posting cannot be for commercial purposes (such as systematic distribution or creating links for customers to articles) and it is not permitted to post to websites outside of the author's institution (other than their own personal Web pages). Similarly, posting of the journal's PDF or HTML files is not permitted and any exception would require permission from Elsevier. We believe it is important to preserve the integrity of the official record of publication at the publisher. Therefore, the final published version (PDF or HTML) of articles as they appear in the journals will continue to be available only on an Elsevier site.

As of June 2007, there are no Elsevier journal exceptions to this policy.   Cell Press and   The Lancet have policies that differ as to preprints, as they will not consider for publication articles already posted publicly. This is a rule agreed upon by   The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. However, both Cell and The Lancet welcome Elsevier's policy on post-publication posting and follow it for their journals. 

If you have questions, please contact Elsevier's Global Rights Department.