“Be a responsible steward of your intellectual property. Retain vital rights for you and your readers while authorizing publishing activities that benefit everyone by making scholarship more widely available.”
— Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
SHERPA / ROMEO is a resource that consolidates publisher open access policies, listing each publisher's copyright transfer agreement. Your can search by journal title or by publisher to determine what a publisher will allow under their standard agreement. An open access policy should specify what level of archiving is acceptable.
Journal Color | Archiving policy |
green  | can archive pre-print and post-print or publisher's version/PDF |
blue | can archive post-print (ie final draft post-refereeing) or publisher's version/PDF |
yellow  | can archive pre-print (ie pre-refereeing) |
white | archiving not formally supported |
What is a pre-print?
It is the author's initial version of an article submitted to a publication before it has been reviewed. Public Library of Science PLOS explains how they handle pre-prints.
Bethel's Faculty Handbook has an appendix, General Policy on Intellectual Property (Bethel Community Only), that describes how ownership of content created by Faculty is determined at Bethel. It was approved by the Teaching and Learning Technology Roundtable and the Faculty Personnel Policies Committee in 2001.