Law Faculty Publishing Guide: Author's Rights

Some publishers require you to sign away all your rights to your intellectual property (IP) in order to have your research published. These contracts are usually referred to as a "Copyright Transfer Agreement" or "Publication Agreement."  Negotiate with publishers to unbundle your rights in order to retain some or all control over your IP.  By unbundling your rights, you can retain certain rights, such as the ability to post your work openly on the WWW or to use your research in a class setting.  If you don't, you may lose all control over future reproduction or dissemination of your work. You may need to seek the publisher's permission to use your own work in a course packet, post it on your personal website, or in an institutional repository (IR). Further, your institution's library is often forced to pay prohibitively high prices to buy back access to the work that you freely gave to the publisher. Thus, you and your institution could find yourselves locked out from your own published research. 

Controlling access to your work makes a lot of sense for publishers, many of whom are realizing huge profits by doing so. But increasing publisher control of IP also represents a grave threat to the scholarly communications system in general. As a scholar working in a milieu where the rewards of publishing are impact and prestige rather than personal monetary gain, you presumably want the largest possible audience for your work and the ability to disseminate it however you see fit. Signing over your IP rights is often at odds with these goals.

By retaining your rights, you will be permitted to

KNOW YOUR RIGHTS AS THE AUTHOR:

• The author is the copyright holder. As the author of a work, you are the copyright holder unless and until you transfer the copyright to someone else in a signed agreement.
• Assigning your rights matters. Normally, the copyright holder possesses the exclusive rights of reproduction, distribution, public performance, public display, and modification of the original work. An author who has transferred copyright without retaining these rights must ask permission unless the use is one of the statutory exemptions in copyright law.
• The copyright holder controls the work. Decisions concerning the use of the work, such as distribution, access, pricing, updates, and any use restrictions, belong to the copyright holder. Authors who have transferred their copyright without retaining any rights may not be able to place the work on course websites, copy it for students or colleagues, deposit the work in a public online archive, or reuse portions in a subsequent work. That’s why it is important to retain the rights you need.
• Transferring copyright doesn’t have to be all or nothing. The law allows you to transfer copyright while holding back rights for yourself and others. This is the compromise that the SPARC Author Addendum (see the box to the right) helps you to achieve. 

A BALANCED APPROACH TO COPYRIGHT MANAGEMENT:

Authors

• Retain the rights you want.
• Use and develop your own work without restriction.
• Increase access for education and research.
• Receive proper attribution when your work is used.
• If you choose, deposit your work in an open online archive where it will be permanently and openly accessible.

Publishers

• Obtain a non-exclusive right to publish and distribute a work and
  receive a financial return.
• Receive proper attribution and citation as journal of first publication.
• Migrate the work to future formats and include it in collections.

The above text comes from SPARC - Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

If the publisher still will not accept your changes,

• consider the changes they will accept;
• consider publishing the work elsewhere;
• consider publishing the work in an open-access journal; or
• publish your work as you originally planned with the original publisher.

Source: Sandy De Groote, Professor & Scholarly Communications Librarian, UIC Daley Library, https://researchguides.uic.edu/c.php?g=1342313&p=9897459.

This is a brief interview with Professor Michael W. Carroll (American University) about author addenda. The video was made in the 2000s, but much of the information is still relevant.  In the video, Professor Carroll references the Creative Commons "Copyright Addendum Engine," which is designed to generate an addendum based on an author's input of information.  The tool appears to be somewhat outdated, but it may still be useful in a general sense. 

Preserve Rights to Your Own Work

You need not automatically sign a publisher's "Copyright Transfer Agreement."

Consider using the Addendum to Publication Agreements for CIC Authors or the SPARC Author Addendum when you submit a publication to a publisher. For more on author addenda, see the video posted below, "Understanding Author Addenda with Professor Michael Carroll." Templates for the CIC and SPARC addenda are posted below. 

The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) is a consortium of 12 US research universities "advancing their missions by sharing expertise, leveraging campus resources and collaborating on innovative programs." The 12 CIC member universities are the University of Chicago; University of Illinois; Indiana University; University of Iowa; University of Michigan; Michigan State University; University of Minnesota; Northwestern University; The Ohio State University; Penn State University; Purdue University; and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

SPARC is the the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. According to its website, it is "a non-profit advocacy organization that supports systems for research and education that are open by default and equitable by design." About 250 libraries and academic institutions are SPARC members, including UIC.

For more on the SPARC Author Addendum, see https://sparcopen.org/our-work/author-rights/brochure-html/.