Scholarly Communication @ UH Manoa

The agreement that you sign with your publisher will often specify the ownership of legal rights to your publication, and many standard publishing agreements shift the copyright to the publisher. The copyright provisions in your agreement can make a profound difference to the value and usefulness of your scholarship. For you to control and optimize access to your work, you must retain the rights you need.

Publishers can use copyrights to prevent access to the publication, or bar you, as the author and researcher, from using your own articles for teaching or as the foundation for future books or other projects. Moreover, when publishers hold all rights, publishers can authorize republication and other uses of your work that may be objectionable.

Look up publisher copyright policies:

• SHERPA/RoMEO: Aggregates and analyzes publisher open access policies from around the world. Provides summaries of self-archiving permissions and conditions of rights given to authors on a journal-to-journal basis.

Learn how to protect your copyrights:

• Know Your Copyrights by the Association of Research Libraries
• More on Author Rights, Copyright Law, and a Guide to Copyright (Purdue University)

Learn more about or create your own author addendums or licenses:

• SPARC Author Addendum to Publication Agreement template
• Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine (Science Commons)
• Create Your Own License (Creative Commons)
• PLOS license example of an open access publisher's policy
• Nature's author license policy (one of the most author-friendly of the subscription-based journals)