Retain Copyright

How do you retain copyright rights to your journal articles so that you can use your own work and permit others to freely read and use it as well?

Copyright is not one right. Rather, it is a bundle of rights that can be individually granted or withheld. These rights can either be granted exclusively to one party or nonexclusively to multiple parties. A legal document, typically called a copyright transfer agreement, governs the copyright arrangements between you and the publisher and determines what rights you retain and what rights you transfer or grant to the publisher. The publisher may offer a single standard agreement or may have more than one agreement.

It is very helpful to have documents written by copyright lawyers such as the ones below that you can use to modify or replace the publisher's agreement with.

Ordered by increasing level of difficulty in getting publisher acceptance, here are the basic strategies for dealing with copyright transfer agreements:

• If the publisher has multiple agreements, choose the one that has the author assigning and/or granting specific rights to the publisher (e.g., ALA Copyright License Agreement). Don't choose the agreement where the author assigns, conveys, grants, or transfers all rights, copyright interest, copyright ownership, and/or title exclusively to the publisher (e.g., ALA Copyright Assignment Agreement).
• If the publisher has a single agreement that assigns, conveys, grants, or transfers all rights, copyright interest, copyright ownership, and/or title exclusively to the publisher:
  • Amend it with one of the Science Commons Author Addenda. (See the FAQ for more details.)
    • OpenAccess-Delay 1.0 Addendum: "Reserves the right for the author to post the author's final manuscript version immediately and the published version six months after publication."
    • OpenAccess-Publish 1.0 Addendum: "Reserves the right for the author to post the published version immediately upon publication."
    • OpenAccess-CreativeCommons 1.0 Addendum: "Reserves the right for the author to post the published version (for example, as a .pdf file) immediately and to grant others a Creative Commons 'Attribution NonCommercial' license to use the article."
  • Amend it with the SPARC Author's Addendum. The Addendum allows you to retain key rights, but not all rights to your article. See the Author's Addendum page for more details.
• Retain copyright ownership and replace the publisher's agreement with the Science Commons Publication Agreement and Copyright License. In addition to retaining copyright, you will specify which Creative Commons License the article will be under. See Creative Commons Licenses for a description of these licenses.

For more information on copyright transfer agreements, see Copyright Resources for Authors and Scholars Have Lost Control of the Process.

For a directory of publisher copyright and self-archiving policies, see Publisher Copyright Policies & Self-Archiving.