LAST UPDATED: November 5, 2009          

ASM Journals Statement of Authors’ Rights

Authors may post their articles to their institutional repositories
ASM grants authors the right to post their accepted manuscripts in publicly accessible electronic repositories maintained by funding agencies, as well as appropriate institutional or subject-based open repositories established by a government or non-commercial entity. Since ASM makes the final, typeset articles from its primary-research journals available free of charge on the ASM Journals and PMC websites 6 months after final publication, ASM recommends that when submitting the accepted manuscript to PMC or institutional repositories, the author specify that the posting release date for the manuscript be no earlier than 6 months after the final publication of the typeset article by ASM.

Authors may post their articles in full on personal or employer websites
ASM grants the author the right to post his/her article (after publication by ASM) on the author’s personal or university-hosted website, but not on any corporate, government, or similar website, without ASM’s prior permission, provided that proper credit is given to the original ASM publication.

Authors may make copies of their articles in full
Corresponding authors are entitled to 10 free downloads of their papers. Additionally, all authors may make up to 99 copies of his/her own work for personal or professional use (including teaching packs that are distributed free of charge within your own institution). For orders of 100 or more copies, you should seek ASM’s permission or purchase access through Highwire’s Pay-Per-View option, available on the ASM online journal sites.

Authors may republish/adapt portions of their articles
ASM also grants the authors the right to republish discrete portions of his/her article in any other publication (including print, CD-ROM, and other electronic formats) of which he or she is author or editor, provided that proper credit is given to the original ASM publication. “Proper credit” means either the copyright lines shown on the top of the first page of the PDF version, or “Copyright © American Society for Microbiology, [insert journal name, volume number, year, page numbers and DOI]” of the HTML version. You may obtain permission from Rightslink. For technical questions about using Rightslink, please contact Customer Support via phone at (877) 622-5543 (toll free) or (978) 777-9929, or e-mail Rightslink customer care at customercare{at}copyright.com

Please note that the ASM is in full compliance with NIH Policy.

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