An individual has rights to the intellectual or creative property they create. 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 Instituational repository or digital collection.
The purpose of this page is to provide information about author's rights and to provide additional resources for further information.
This article describes one person's experience with rights.
Creative Commons allows authors to customize how they want to disseminate their work to the world - Click here to find out more!
Here's a brief explanation of how your rights as an author may be impacted by publication
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is a great source of information on author's rights, including this AUTHOR'S ADDENDUM . This addendum is a legal instrument that modifies the publisher’s agreement and allows authors to keep key rights.
For Example: To secure sufficient rights to deposit the work in Digital Collections@TxState and to reuse their own work, the author could modify the language of the standard publishing agreement as follows:
“Notwithstanding the above language, I reserve the right to use this work in my teaching and research, for my colleagues at the Texas State University – San Marcos to use this work in their teaching and research, and I also reserve the right to place an electronic copy of this work on a publicly accessible web site.”
Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington University School of Medicine, provides an informative list of phrases to look for in publisher copyright agreement forms. The document lists examples of rights and stipulations in various copyright agreement forms.
This guide is designed to share information on copyright and related topics. This guide does not supply legal advice nor is it intended to replace the advice of legal counsel.