Statement of Author Rights

ASM Author Center / Preparing Your Manuscript

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.

In preparation for the REF 2021, ASM would like to remind Authors that the current author fee structure, along with the policy outlined above, allows authors to comply with the HEFCE deposition requirements. If authors have paid a fee to make their article "gold" open access then there is no need to worry about these deposition requirements (See section 38 of the "Policy for open access in Research Excellence Framework 2021" document).

Please note that 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.

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.

Once ASM grants permission to the author, ASM requests that the posting release date for the content be no earlier than 6 months after the final publication of the typeset article by ASM.

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 author 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. An ASM author also retains the right to reuse the full article in his/her dissertation or thesis. “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. 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@copyright.com.

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