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Know Your Rights
More Tools & Resources
See the Tools & Resources tab of this guide for additional information.
Introduction to Authors' Rights
When you publish a journal article, you sign a copyright agreement. Some journals require you to relinquish your copyright, meaning that you have to ask permission or pay a fee to share your article with others. Some journals allow you to retain some rights (e.g., the right to post online). And other journals leave copyright in your hands. You simply give the journal a non-exclusive license to publish the article.
Explore the links below to find out about the copyright policies of specific journals and/or to find tools and resources to help you negotiate a contract that preserves your rights to reproduce, distribute, and display the work you create as a scholar and author.
Copyright
- The Keep Your Copyrights ProjectColumbia Law School project "designed to help creators hold on to their copyrights, to license their rights on author-friendly terms, and in general to encourage creators to take a more active role in managing the life of their creative work."
- Creative Commons: Choose a LicenseYou keep copyright; others distribute & cite by your rules.
- SHERPA/RoMEOMost academic publishers offer standing permission for authors to "self-archive" some version of their article in an OA repository; check a journal's self-archiving policy here.
- SPARC Author AddendumA legal instrument that modifies the publisher’s agreement and allows you to keep key rights to your articles. A model deal to strike.
- Big Ten Academic Alliance - Scholarly CommunicationThe Big Ten's (formerly the Committee on Institutional Cooperation or CIC) scholarly communication initiatives include a Statement on Publishing Agreements with a sample addendum whereby authors retain a degree of control over the distribution of their intellectual property.
Authors Alliance
The Authors Alliance focuses on the issues of authors' rights, authorship law and policy, reaching audiences, and authorial reputation and integrity. Resources available on their website include a Rights Reversion Guide & Portal; Open Access Guide & Portal, FAQs, and a Resource Library containing all of their own resources and links to helpful items around the web.