OPEN POLICY FINDER (FORMERLY SHERPA ROMEO) AND DULCINEA: WHERE TO CHECK A JOURNAL'S SELF-ARCHIVING POLICY.

By María García-Puente · Article · Updated July 2026

You publish an article in a journal, and weeks later you want to upload it to your institution's repository, share it on ResearchGate, or send it to a colleague who doesn't have access. And the same old doubt comes up: can I? Which version? From what date?

There's no single answer, because it depends on the agreement you signed (almost always without reading it) when you accepted publication. Each publisher has its own self-archiving policy: which version of the article you can deposit, where, and after what embargo period. Reading those policies one by one, buried in the small print of every publisher's website, is tedious work even for those of us who do this for a living.

That's why publisher-policy databases exist. For two decades, the international reference was Sherpa Romeo, and for Spanish journals, Dulcinea. Both still serve that purpose in 2026, but one of them has changed its name, so it's worth catching up.

In Spain, this has also stopped being optional for many researchers: the Science Law (Ley de la Ciencia), reformed in 2022, requires depositing the accepted version of publications derived from publicly funded research in an open-access repository. Knowing what your journal allows is no longer just good practice — it's how you comply with your funder without stepping on the publisher's copyright.

• Submitted version (or preprint): the manuscript as you sent it to the journal, before peer review. This is the version deposited on servers like medRxiv or bioRxiv.
• Accepted version (postprint or AAM, author accepted manuscript): the text after peer review and acceptance, with the reviewers' changes incorporated but without the journal's typesetting. This is the version usually required by open-access mandates, including the Spanish law.
• Published version (or version of record): the final PDF typeset by the publisher, with pagination and a DOI. This is the most restricted version: unless the article was published open access, almost no publisher allows depositing it.

1. The web address is new: openpolicyfinder.jisc.ac.uk. If you had the old Sherpa Romeo link saved, update it.
2. You can check the journal and the funder in one place: you can look up the journal's self-archiving policy and, at the same time, your funding agency's open-access requirements, and see whether they're compatible.
3. Information is organized by manuscript version, not by color. Sherpa Romeo's old color code (green, blue, yellow, white) was already dropped in the 2020 redesign, because the open-access landscape had become too complex to sum up in a single color. Open Policy Finder keeps that approach: for each journal, it shows separately what you can do with the published, accepted, and submitted versions.

1. Go to openpolicyfinder.jisc.ac.uk and search for the journal by title or ISSN (the ISSN avoids mix-ups between similarly named journals).
2. The journal's record shows the publishing routes it offers and, for each version of the article (published, accepted, submitted), the conditions: whether it can be deposited, where (institutional repository, subject repository, personal website), under what license, and after what embargo.
3. Pay special attention to the embargo on the accepted version: it's usually the detail that decides when you can upload your postprint to the repository. A 12-month embargo in biomedicine is still common among subscription journals.
4. If your research has public funding, also check your funder's record on the same platform and confirm that the journal's policy lets you meet its requirements.

What if the journal is Spanish? International databases have always had patchy coverage of journals from our own region, and that's where Dulcinea still comes in — the project run by the Universitat de Barcelona and the CSIC that tracks the copyright and self-archiving policies of Spanish scholarly journals.

Dulcinea is still active in 2026, now integrated into the Open Science Spain ecosystem (if you had it bookmarked at its old domain, accesoabierto.net, update the bookmark: the current address is dulcinea.opensciencespain.org). At the time of writing, it covers close to 1,900 Spanish journals, with each one's access policy, exploitation rights, and self-archiving conditions.

One detail longtime users will appreciate: Dulcinea keeps the color classification that Sherpa Romeo dropped. Of its nearly 1,900 journals, about 570 are green (they allow archiving the preprint and the postprint), more than 1,100 are blue (allow the postprint or the publisher's version), and around 170 are white (don't allow self-archiving). For a quick snapshot of the Spanish landscape, that code is still extremely useful; for the fine detail on versions and embargoes, check each journal's record.

• International journal: Open Policy Finder (remember: it's the former Sherpa Romeo, now with more features).
• Spanish journal: check Dulcinea first; if the journal has international reach, cross-check it in Open Policy Finder too.
• Publicly funded project: check your funder's policy in Open Policy Finder as well as the journal's, and keep in mind the deposit requirement under the Science Law.
• The journal doesn't appear in either database: go to the publisher's website (look for "self-archiving policy" or "sharing policy") or write directly to the journal before depositing anything.

• Jisc: Sherpa services combined into new user-friendly platform: open policy finder (November 2024).
• Open Policy Finder and its note on the retirement of the legacy Sherpa API.
• Indiana University Libraries: Introducing Open Policy Finder (November 2024).
• Dulcinea, accessed July 2026.
• Law 14/2011 on Science, Technology and Innovation, Art. 37 (as amended by Law 17/2022).