What You Can Do:
Manage Your Rights
"We call on UC authors and scholars … to exercise control of their scholarship … to ensure the widest dissemination of works…."
(The Case for Scholars' Management of Their Copyright (PDF) endorsed by the UC Academic Council, April 2006)
Q: Why should I retain my copyright?
A: More readers, greater impact.
Copyright, when signed over to a publisher, limits your ability to disseminate your work. By retaining your copyright, you can maximize your options for dissemination, thus maximizing your work's potential reach and gaining a wider audience for your scholarship.
Q: How do I retain my rights?
A: Attach an author's addendum to your contract.
An author's addendum is a standardized legal tool that can be used by journal authors to modify publisher copyright transfer agreements. An addendum, signed by both author and publisher, can be attached to your contract and is legally binding (i.e. the amendment "trumps" the Publisher's agreement).
UC recommends the Amendment to Publication Agreement (PDF). (Also available as a Word document.)
- This addendum gives authors the right to:
- reproduce, distribute, perform, and display the work in teaching (i.e. distribute the article in question to students or colleagues. Just be sure you cite the article and journal properly.)
- prepare derivative works (i.e. as an author, you can publish subsequent works or make public presentations based on your own previously published scholarship.)
- make the work available in online digital form (i.e. you can post your article on your own personal website, deposit it in the UC eScholarship Repository or another repository like PubMed Central) as long as you wait until after the article has been published
- give the author's employing institution the right to place the work on an online repository (that is, you allow the University to post your work in an institutional repository)
- What if the publisher rejects the author addendum?
If the publisher rejects the addendum, write back explaining why it is important to retain rights to your own work. Also register your objection with the editorial board and, if the journal is published by a commercial publisher on behalf of a society, write to the society as well.
Consider publishing in an open-access journal or with a publisher that will allow you to retain your copyright. The Directory of Open Access Journals, listing almost 2500 titles, is one place to look.
Publishing elsewhere may be neither practical or desirable. Rather than attaching an addendum, consider just marking out and replacing a phrase or two and then signing the amended publisher-supplied copyright transfer agreement.
Share your experience with the campus . The Library hopes to keep a record of publisher behavior. We may ask your permission to post a redacted version of your correspondence on a public website.
- Post your article to a repository
As an author of a journal article you are entitled to post your work in a repository (a practice often referred to as "author self archiving" or "open access self archiving") regardless of the publisher. Publishers differ on what version of the article may be posted. Check the SHERPA/RoMEO site to see your publisher's policy. Or, simply post your version of the article and let the eScholarship staff do the behind-the-scenes legwork.
The advantages of posting an article to a repository are:- The article can be discovered by anyone doing a Google search (wider audience).
- Articles residing in a repository are ensured archival access.
- As an author, you can post related and associated files that can't be published in a traditional journal.
Resources
Many other universities have recommended that their authors retain their copyright by attaching an addendum to the copyright transfer agreement. MIT has produced a Copyright Amendment Form. Science Commons has produced The Scholars Copyright Addendum Engine, which allows authors to enter basic information about their articles to generate a printable addendum for author publishing agreements.
Resources for Authors
From SPARC. Includes more information about the Copyright Addendum Engine and other practical information for journal authors.
Reshaping Scholarly Communication: Manage Your Intellectual Property
From the UC Office of Scholarly Communication.
Seizing the Moment: Scientists' Authorship Rights in the Digital Age
A 2002 report by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) concludes that "scientists should be more assertive in claiming their intellectual property rights…" in order "to increase access to and use of their works…."
Taking Back Control: Managing Copyright and Intellectual Property (PDF)
From the UC Berkeley Faculty Conference on Scholarly Publishing, March 2005.
UC Open Access Policy
Currently in the public comment phase, this policy proposes that UC faculty authors of published articles or conference proceedings routinely transfer a non-exclusive copyright to the University. The University will, in turn, make UC research findings available in a publicly accessible repository such as eScholarship.
