A draft of a scholarly article that is being made publicly available prior to (peer-review and) acceptance is called a preprint.

More about:

• Sharing Preprints (course on the practice of sharing preprints, provided by FOSTER)
• What is a preprint? (blog post on preprints in the PsyArXiv FAQs)
• Preprint policies per journal (Wikipedia page)
• Creative Commons Licenses (suitable licenses for preprints)
• Creative Commons Licenses (English guide focussed on researchers in the Netherlands)

Tools:

• Preprint Repositories (overview of preprint services created by Joseph McArthur)