Publishing Your Research

What is Author Rights?

As soon as you begin creating a scholarly work in fixed medium, it is covered under copyright law and no other actions are necessary for it to be protected. You as the author have the following rights unless and until you transfer the copyright in a signed agreement:

• The exclusive rights of reproduction
• Distribution
• Public performance
• Public display
• Modification of the original work

But, when your article is reviewed and accepted, you may be asked to sign a standard agreement that transfers your copyright.  You do not have to transfer your rights to be published. Authors can retain the rights to their work by negotiating an author's addendum, publishing under a Creative Commons license, and other open alternatives.

Author Addendum

Publication agreements may be restrictive and may limit who may have access to your work.  Signing such an agreement may prevent you from re-using or sharing your work through a professional web page or depositing it an online repository. This may result in lessen the impact of your research. Scholarly authors should consider attaching an authors addendum to retain author rights.  The addendum should state that, regardless of terms agreed to in the publishing contract or agreement, the author retains a non-exclusive right to continue to use the work, to modify it, and to share it online. SPARC (the Scholalry Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has developed an authors addendum to use as a legal instrument that modifies the publisher's agreement and always the author to retain key rights.

Creative Commons

The Creative Commons (CC) licenses and tools forge a balances  the “all rights reserved” of copyright with the freedom to share your work. CC provides a standardized way to explicitly grant permission to certain uses of their copyrighted works. 

CC licenses are customizable to how you would like your work to be used. Some examples include: CC-BY, which only requires that content be attributed when reused; CC-BY-ND, which requires attribution, but does not allow derivatives of your work to be produced; CC-BY-NC, which requires attribution, but does not allow for any commercial uses of your work. Use the Creative Commons License Chooser to choose the best CC license for your work.

Open Alternatives

One alternative to signing away the rights to your research and writing is to publish your work openly. There are many ways of doing this, including in peer-reviewed open access journals. The reality, however, is that peer-reviewed open access journals may charge an article processing charge (APC) does not encourage and makes it very difficult for many scholars to publish openly. For more information discuss your open access options with your liaison librarian.