Self-Archiving is the first open access strategy identified by the Budapest Open Access Initiative-BOAI. Stevan Harnad refers to it as the "Green Road" to open access, and this term has come into common usage.
When authors make their articles freely available in digital form on the Internet, they are said to be "self-archiving" them. These articles can be either "preprints" or "postprints".
Both digital preprints and postprints are called "e-prints.“