Scholarly Communications: Getting Started

See the Author Rights and Publishing Agreements Guide for more information.

Authors who publish articles in scholarly journals often sign away copyright to their scholarly work without knowing.  Many times this can be avoided by negotiating with the publisher to maintain your copyright.

By retaining control of your copyright, you will be able to:

• Reuse your work in teaching, future publications and in scholarly and professional activities.
• Post your work online or "self-archive".
  • Some publishers allow authors to post the accepted manuscript or original manuscript online - not the version created by the publisher.

An individual has rights to the intellectual or creative works they produce.  As an author, you own the rights to your work from the moment that work takes on some fixed form, until or unless the rights are transferred to another entity. Traditional publishing contracts often assign copyright to the publisher, thus limiting how and where the work can be used and distributed in the future. If this happens, authors may be restricted from incorporating this work into their teaching and research, posting it to a website, or in an Institutional repository or digital collection. 

See the Author Rights and Publishing Agreements Guide for more information, or contact us: scholcomm@txstate.edu