The SHERPA/RoMEO Listings provide details of journal publishers' policies with respect to the self-archiving of scientific and scholarly publications. The listings are not, however, legally binding. In case of doubt, the publishing agreement prevails. Publishers are assigned to one of four colour categories according to their self-archiving policy:
| Preselection publishers | |||
 Green Publishers | Preprint (pre-refereeing) and postprint (final draft, post refereeing) may be archived. | ||
 Blue Publishers | Postprint may be archived. | ||
 Yellow Publishers | Preprint may be archived.. | ||
 White Publishers | Archiving not formally supported. | ||
RoMEO (Rights MEtadata for Open archiving) was a project funded in 2002/2003 by JISC at the University of Loughborough to investigate the rights issues surrounding the self-archiving of research literature in the UK. One of the fruits of the project was a list of journal publishers' self-archiving policies. SHERPA developed this list into a database which can be searched by publisher name or journal title to find details of the self-archiving rights which publishers normally give their authors.
Link to the SHERPA/RoMEO Listings.
Information on publishers is kept up to date by means of contributions from members of the user community. Users are invited to suggest an update to the current records via a link at the end of the search results and to enter their suggestions in an online form. The content of the database is primarily intended for use by the scientific community and should not be relied upon for legal advice. The terms of the actual publishing agreement prevail.
By now, the majority of publishers support the right of authors to make their works openly accessible online. However, some publishers continue to include a clause in their publishing agreements forbidding their authors to do so.
The German language interface was set up by the Open Access Policies project, a collaboration between Stuttgart University Library and the Computer and Media Service of the Humboldt University Berlin funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The data are made available by the University of Nottingham's SHERPA-RoMEO project. As yet, the listings do not feature a large number of German publishers. Indeed, many of the leading German publishing houses are still absent. However, the user community is expressly invited to provide information about these publishers' archiving policies to SHERPA/RoMEO.
Spiecker, Claus & Schulz, Matthias (2010). "Was gestatten deutsche Verlage ihren Autoren?" Der deutschsprachige Zugang zu den Open-Access-Informationen der SHERPA/RoMEO-Datenbank.