2.0 INTRODUCTION
In an academic research environment, scholarly communications become central part of the process of deliberations. Scholars across the world are now better equipped with services offered by open access knowledge repositories for self-archiving their intellectual outcomes of scholarly research, i.e., research publications and research reports. Global open access statements enlighten academic researchers to make use of Green open access channels for harnessing global visibility, readability and cross-border knowledge transfer. Open access (OA) institutional repositories, national repositories or disciplinary knowledge repositories are considered as Green open access channels, where researchers have their freedom to share and distribute their research publications in digital formats. Besides, major OA declarations and statements, endorsed by the scientific institutions and communities, have identified Gold OA as major channel for scholarly communications. Public-funded research literatures are supposed to be made available through the Gold OA channel, in order to keep knowledge flow uninterruptedly across the world. Peer-reviewed OA journals belong to Gold OA channel. Thus, every academic researcher, after completing a research study, tries to identify possible publishing avenues for communicating research results. In this Unit, various authors’ tools for identifying different self-archiving avenues and their credentials are briefly discussed. This Unit also gives you a brief overview on workflow and submission process in self-archiving, and permission and licensing choices for disseminating research through Green open access channels. This Unit also gives you brief overview on paradigms of regional open access directories and journal gateways, and their strengths and weaknesses.