Determine, Negotiate, and Retain Your Author Rights

Most publishers' agreements ask that you assign your copyright to the publisher when they publish your work. However, if you transfer your rights to the publisher, you may limit your ability to use and share your work with others and you may need to seek permission from the publisher to make some specific uses of your own work. For example, problems may arise when you or others want to: use your work in a course pack, place copies on print or electronic reserves, post a copy on your website, and distribute a copy to colleagues.

Here are some steps you can take:

Determine what rights you retain from previous publications, and find publishers and journals that give you more liberal permissions to use your own work:

While the Libraries can't tell you where to publish, we can help you find tools and information to inform your decisions.

Use an author addendum to negotiate and retain author rights to your work:

Authors are encouraged to negotiate and retain the rights to their work. By attaching an addendum to your publishing agreement, you can retain control of your work in order to use it for purposes such as distributing copies in the course of teaching and research, posting the article on a personal or institutional website, etc.

• NIH Publishing Agreement & Manuscript Cover Sheet
  In compliance with the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy, if your publication is the result of NIH funded research you must attach this cover sheet with every submission to a peer-reviewed publication. This is to enable NIH funded research to be deposited in PubMed, as is stipulated policy.
• SPARC Author Addendum to Publication Agreement
  This is a sample addendum by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) which can be used to negotiate and retain rights to your work.
• The Open Access Directory List of Addenda
  List of addenda, including those that are institution-specific, that can be used by authors to retain specific rights.
• SHERPA/RoMEO
  This site collects information on default copyright and self-archiving policies for publishers and journals (individual authors may negotiate for exceptions/changes). Search by journal title, publisher or ISSN to view and determine what rights you may still hold to your work and/or your ability to post and share your article once published.