We prove that for nonlinear elastic energies with strong enough energetic control of the outer distortion of admissible deformations, almost everywhere global invertibility as constraint can be obtained in the $\Gamma$-limit of the elastic energy with an added nonlocal self-repulsion term with asymptocially vanishing coefficient. The self-repulsion term considered here formally coincides with a Sobolev–Slobodeckiĭ seminorm of the inverse deformation. Variants near the boundary or on the surface of the domain are also studied.