Copyright Resources

When an author (or creator) writes an article for a scholarly journal, a chapter for a book, a monograph, or other work, they are typically asked to sign a publication agreement or a copyright transfer agreement. 
These agreements may be negotiable. You as the creator can retain some specific rights whether inherently granted by the publisher or sought as part of the negotiation process. A few examples of rights you may wish to maintain:

• include articles in course packs or online course modules
• place articles on a personal website
• archive in an institutional repository like Digital Scholarship@UNLV

Publishers may not always want to negotiate their default copyright transfer agreement, and your request to maintain some or all rights to your work may be declined.

A copyright addendum helps authors ask for certain rights for their own works. Try using these when preparing to sign a copyright transfer agreement.

• SPARC Author Addendum to Publication Agreement: This document includes author retention of rights; publisher commitments; and prior license acknowledgements. Fill out the agreement form; attach it with your post-print, and email to the publisher.
  • Author Rights: Using the SPARC Author Addendum: This is a brochure that provides additional help and explanation for using the amendment
• Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine: Helps you generate a PDF form you can attach to a journal publisher's copyright agreement requesting to retain specific rights.

Paywalled journals

Your copyright transfer agreement is the ultimate source of information regarding your rights in your publication, but some information on publisher policies, particularly in regard to re-posting and sharing your work online, can be found on the Open Policy Finder.

Depending on the journal, authors may find that they:

• turn copyright over to the publisher, and have specific, limited rights granted back to them
• are asked to grant a non-exclusive license to the publisher, typically for the right of first formal publication and maintain specific rights

Open Access Journals

As with paywalled journals, review your author agreement carefully for OA journals. There should be some significant differences between the two models' author agreements however. These include:

• Article published under a Creative Commons license with or without transfer of copyright to the publisher (this makes the article easier to reuse for not only the original author but also readers)
• Copyright may be maintained by the author. If this is important to you, be sure and check the journal policies before you submit your article.
• Learn more about open access publishing on the Open Access guide.

Not all OA journals are the same in regard to copyright. While authors should always check current policies on the journal website for the journal they are interested in, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) provides a snapshot of each open access journal's policy. This includes whether the author retains their copyright and which creative commons license works are published under.  Here are two very different examples from the DOAJ:

Chem & Bio Engineering, American Chemical Society (DOAJ record checked 12/2024)

• The author does not retain unrestricted copyrights and publishing rights.
• This journal uses a CC-BY (most lenient) or a CC BY-NC-ND (more restrictive) license

PLOS Water, PLOS, (DOAJ record checked 12/2024)

• The author retains unrestricted copyrights and publishing rights.
• This journal uses a CC BY (most lenient) license.

What about Hybrid journals?

Hybrid journals provide authors an option to have their work paywalled or open access. Depending on the option the author chooses, the author agreement will likely resemble that of a fully paywalled or fully open journal as described above.