Postprint

A postprint — more precisely, an author-accepted manuscript (AAM) — is the version of a manuscript immediately after peer review and an editorial decision of acceptance, but before the publisher applies typesetting, pagination, and copy-editing. It contains the same substantive content, findings, and conclusions as the eventual published article; what it lacks is the publisher’s formatting layer. “Postprint” and “author-accepted manuscript” are used interchangeably in most funder and repository policy language.

How this differs from a preprint and the version of record

Unlike a preprint, a postprint has already been through peer review and carries an acceptance decision — it is not a pre-review draft. Unlike the version of record, it has not been typeset, paginated, or copy-edited by the publisher, and it typically does not carry the publisher’s final page numbers or formatting. The postprint is the version most funder open-access mandates target for repository deposit, precisely because it is the earliest state that is both peer-reviewed and something the author is legally entitled to self-archive under most publisher agreements.

A caution on the label itself

"Post-print" (hyphenated or not) is contested terminology and should not be relied on alone. Some publishers and repositories use it as a direct synonym for the author-accepted manuscript; others use it to mean the publisher's final typeset file, i.e. what this dictionary calls the version of record; and older literature sometimes distinguishes an unrevised "post-print" from a separately labelled AAM. Because self-archiving permissions and embargo periods attach to specific manuscript versions rather than to labels, check the journal's terms in a per-version source such as Open Policy Finder (formerly Sherpa Romeo), which records permissions separately for the submitted version, the accepted manuscript, and the published version.

Example

A copy of an accepted manuscript deposited in an institutional repository, matching the accepted Word or PDF file exactly as it existed at the moment of editorial acceptance — before the publisher’s production team touched it.

Policy context

Postprint deposit is the backbone of the “green” open-access route: most publisher agreements permit self-archiving the postprint (sometimes after an embargo) even when the version of record stays paywalled. The NIH’s 2025 Public Access Policy update (NOT-OD-25-101) requires deposit of the author-accepted manuscript itself, not a summary or preprint, into PubMed Central. Wellcome Trust’s policy separately accepts AAM deposit via Europe PMC as a standard compliance route. Embargo length and permitted repository are set by the individual publisher agreement, so authors should check the specific journal’s self-archiving policy (commonly tracked via Sherpa Romeo, now rebranded Open Policy Finder) rather than assume a blanket rule.